The Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF) with several public and private partners has produced a set of case studies derived from six local workshops on water and wastewater utilities and extreme climate and weather. From the publication:

Extreme climate and weather events are occurring more frequently and with more intensity across the nation, often leaving communities – and the water utilities that serve them – reeling from costly aftermath. These extreme events have the potential to disrupt water services including drinking water supply, wastewater conveyance and treatment, and stormwater management.

Water resources and services have reverberating impacts on energy, development, and economic sectors. Utilities’ abilities to successfully respond and adapt to increasing trends of extreme events is of the utmost importance for the water sector itself, but equally important for resiliency in all sectors.

This report is intended to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing on how water resource managers are coping with these events and building future resiliency, as well as to identify gaps in the availability of information and information pathways needed to inform local decision making. This examination of current and future risks, and exchange of successful strategies contributes to nationwide efforts to advance extreme event preparation and adaptation to climate change.

This report is based on the results of six local workshops, organized to include participants that experienced different types of extreme events throughout a river basin or watershed:

• Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin, Georgia
• Central Texas Region
• Lower Missouri River Basin, Kansas and Missouri
• National Capital Area
• Russian River Basin, California
• Tidewater Area, Virginia

The report discusses how water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities – and other local water resource managers – in these six regions made decisions in response to recent extreme events. The study examines what happened, how information was used to inform decisions, what ES-2institutional dynamics helped or hindered, and how water utilities (and their communities) are planning to deal with extreme events in the future.

Partnering organizations were:

• Water Research Foundation
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Concurrent Technologies Corporation
• Noblis