Raising Awareness of Water Issues: Asset Resilience to Flooding
Skilton, L. and Taylor, A., Atkins Ltd
(free)
Following the release of the Ofwat guidance document: ‘Asset Resilience to Flood Hazards:
Development of an analytical framework’, Atkins was appointed by two water companies to
implement the Ofwat methodology as part of their PR09 Business Plan submissions.
The Ofwat guidance document provides a framework to assess flooding at critical
Infrastructure and Non-Infrastructure sites to provide improved resilience in terms of
economic benefits and security of supply both to companies and their customers. It advocates
a three stage process: Risk Screening, Risk Analysis and Risk Management. In accordance
with the Ofwat guidance document Infrastructure and Non-Infrastructure assets were
reviewed. This identified several sites that fell into the ‘Significant Risk’ and ‘Moderate Risk’
categories, requiring the recommendation and subsequent outline design of flood protection
measures.
Atkins is one of the first Consultants in the UK to implement the framework. This paper
describes the application of the methodology for both a detailed assessment and a high level
overview as undertaken for two water companies.
KEYWORDS
Asset Resilience, Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA), Failure Mode Effects Consequence Analysis
(FMECA), Flooding, Infrastructure, Non-Infrastructure, Risk.
