ADVERTISEMENT
HDR’s Data-Driven Utility Management Services
H
DR is a major architectural, engineering, and consulting firm that has worked on infrastructure projects around the world, including bridges, highways, parks, hospitals, arenas, and treatment facilities. Perhaps lesser known are its utility management services, which help water and wastewater utilities plan, manage, operate, and fund infrastructure. One of HDR’s key utility management services focuses on performing expert analyses of water and wastewater utilities’ buried pipelines and assets and providing utility-specific, datadriven pipeline renewal and replacement planning. This helps utilities know when to replace and rehabilitate their infrastructure to reduce water main breaks and service disruptions and, ultimately, to save money. In this interview, Allan Scott, HDR’s lead for utility management services in Northern California, and Trent Stober, HDR’s national director for utility management services, speak with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how HDR performs its data-driven analyses and how its client utilities use them to inform their operations. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions. Allan Scott: I am HDR’s lead for utility management services in Northern California. My work focuses on projects concerning asset management, maintenance and operations, and business consulting for water and wastewater utilities. I’ve been working in this area for about 20 years. Before that, I worked on other water resource projects, both in consulting and for a couple of different municipalities.
12 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER
across the country. This work has been focused on a variety of issues that utilities face today, including asset management, capital planning, regulatory issues, and financial effects. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about HDR’s utility management services division. Trent Stober: We have about 150 technical practitioners in utilities management services, located across the United States. The municipal water service lines include utility planning, master planning, asset management, hydraulic modeling, rates and finance, operations consulting, and regulatory support for municipal utilities’ Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Water Act obligations. Joshua Dill: What are the main asset management problems that municipal water districts and other water utility managers are facing? Trent Stober: Our nation’s utilities own and operate a vast amount of infrastructure that is nearing the end of its useful life. The funding needed to manage these assets to meet customer service goals can be daunting. We’re at a point in the industry where we have to apply a decision process for how to maintain, rehabilitate, and replace our buried infrastructure, including facilities like pump stations and treatment plants, in a costeffective, defensible, and data-driven
manner. Our ultimate goal is to use a proactive and repeatable approach to gain the highest value out of our infrastructure investments. Allan Scott: Water and wastewater utilities have a significant amount of aging infrastructure. The value of their buried infrastructure can range from hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars and may represent the majority of their capital investment. They have to decide how much and where they’re going to spend their capital dollars on replacing or rehabilitating this aging infrastructure. Of course, the overall goal is to keep the system viable and to continue to meet the needs and expectations of their customers and stakeholders. That hasn’t changed over time: They’ve always wanted to put the investments where they’re going to do the most to maintain or improve their services. But how exactly to do that is difficult to figure out, especially for water utilities. Water distribution systems are closed systems, so you can’t run a camera inside them or physically inspect them. In the past, utilities have relied largely on indirect engineering assessments, intuition, and on the past experience of the operators regarding what needs the most attention. This approach doesn’t always align with the actual highestpriority needs of the system. One of the things that we’re helping utilities pivot toward is the data-driven assessment of risk and vulnerability. That provides a transparent and consistent
PHOTOS COURTESY OF HDR.
Trent Stober: I’m HDR’s national director for utility management services. I have been in the field for 25 years, working on utility planning for water and wastewater utilities
Material, vintage, and location are all factors that determine a pipe’s longevity.
