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Strategic Response 4

Protecting our critical water supply assets

With increasing risks of disruption (for example, from severe weather events resulting from climate change and
increased reliance on technology) and limited customer tolerance of supply outages, we will improve the resilience
of critical water assets which have high consequences of failure.

SR4 - Protecting our critical water supply assets with David Taylor

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This strategic response ensures a high
degree of resilience for all those assets for
which the consequence of failure is so great
that it cannot be mitigated by an operational
response, such as rezoning or tankering. It is
unnecessary to achieve the same level of
protection at all our other assets as their
failure can continue to be mitigated through
operational means. For these critical assets,
Welsh Water has made an assessment of
the resilience to the following threats:
security, flooding, coastal erosion,
catastrophic failure, contamination, loss of
power and cyber threat. We propose a riskbased
approach, targeting assets with a high
consequence of failure first. We have
identified the following measures to improve
resilience:
• Complete security upgrades;
• Installation of flood resilience measures
around critical assets;
• Improvements to power resilience and
onsite power generation;
• Upgrades to treatment works control
systems;
• Improvements to treatment flexibility to
deal with varying raw water conditions;
• Improvements to maintain access;
• Develop, test and refine business
continuity plans for key assets; and
• Twinning of strategic mains crossing
under rivers, roads and railways.
Dams and dam pipework are considered in
strategic response 2, “enough water for all”.
We have also recognised the need to
develop ‘best practice’ resilience design and
operation standards.

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Welsh Water will explore the following
research topics to support this initiative:
• Commission research to assess flood risk
to critical sites, using a wider historical
evidence base than studies to date;
• Develop new pipe repair technologies
with our Alliance and other suitable
partners, including self-repair
technologies;
• Research different post-event recovery
approaches to inform continuity plans;
and,
• Research interdependencies between
infrastructure sectors including energy,
transport and the supply chain. This
research may be a collaboration with
energy and transport agencies as well as
the supply chain.
We will collaborate with Category 1 and 2
responders on these topics.

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If you would like to find out more about all the Strategic Responses please CLICK HERE
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