The water industry has put forward plans to improve its handling of extreme weather events next winter and beyond following the extreme weather event known as the “Beast from the East”.
Water UK’s report, submitted to Ofwat, highlights the sorts of actions already being taken by water companies to improve their response to future extreme weather-related events. It also identifies areas for further collaborative work by the sector.
Companies since then have been taking action to ensure that they are in a better position to face extreme cold weather this coming weather, as set out in their plans for submission to Ofwat by 28th September.
Action being taken by companies - who are due to submit their individual action plans to Ofwat - falls under three broad categories:
planning and preparation: carrying out preparedness exercises, with lessons learnt from recent events, enhancing leakage detection and updating modelling scenarios
stakeholder and customer engagement: reviewing the effectiveness of wider communication strategies and understanding what worked well in the deployment of alternative water supplies, and improving communications to customers ahead of the winter
incident response: working proactively and collaboratively with multi-agency partners, such as Local Resilience Fora, and with the supply chain, to maximise the deployment of resources and facilitate a stronger response across larger numbers of affected customers.
Water UK has also identified priorities for further, collective action to complement what is already being done by companies:
agreeing an industry approach to planning for supply risk associated with extreme weather-related incidents
improving the arrangements by which companies make provision for alternative water supplies
improving the robustness of arrangements under which bulk supplies are provided between companies
improving engagement with affected customers
sharing insights on the use of big data to understand network performance better
enhancing customer side resilience
For each priority, the report identifies actions for companies collectively to take forward over the next 12 months, with particular emphasis on action in the shorter term.
The programme of activity needed to take forward the priorities will be overseen by a newly-formed Operations Strategy Group comprised of senior operations leaders from water companies. A quarterly progress report will be published through the Operations Strategy Group, and a fuller 12-month review of what has been achieved will be carried out by the end of September 2019.
The full report can be found here: Learning from the impacts of the 2018 freeze-thaw