Develop a Water Sector Emergency Handbook
Mary-Anna Holden is a former New Jersey Commissioner. Butch Howard is a former South Carolina Commissioner.
Are your state’s water and wastewater utilities hardened enough to withstand possible long-term outages such as a Black Sky event or a hurricane? Now that we are amid hurricane season 2025 through December first, with predictions of a stormy September/October, we should all be engaging with water and wastewater utilities’ storm resilience even if you do not regulate them. Because we all use their services.
Read the Handbook
If you have no plan to sustain water operations during long-term power outages, realize that your decisions will have a dramatic health effect upon communities. We’re suggesting development of a water sector playbook that scales up emergency plans to consider and prioritize operations as suggested in “Energy Infrastructure Security EPRO Handbook II, Water.”
This handbook takes a hard-core look at sectors-integrated planning for prolonged outages. After all, power is essential for pumping water to the treatment plant and then to the wastewater plant, so it is critical for maintaining public health.
During Superstorm Sandy, enough raw sewage was released into New York Harbor from New York and New Jersey to cover the entire island of Manhattan in a foot-and-a-half of untreated waste. How’s that for a virtual picture? Imagine the potential for the spread of disease and this was discharged into the bay and then to the ocean.