Professors Create Tool to Help Measure B.C. Drinking Water Quality

A tool has been created by UBC Okanagan professors to help better drinking water infrastructure.

Solomon Tesfamariam and Rehan Sadiq, civil engineering professors at UBC Okanagan created the tool to address the different challenges associated with aging drinking water infrastructure.

“While larger cities like Vancouver or Toronto have access to budgets, engineers, and sophisticated data collection systems, smaller centres often have a single person who is responsible for looking after the entire drinking water system,” said Tesfamariam.

“Measuring how your system is doing and where investments are likely to have the greatest value to citizens is a very data intensive process, one which most small jurisdictions are just not equipped to handle.”

The new tool will help smaller areas:

1. Understand what data is important to collect
2. How to collect that data
3. How to develop inventories of the various elements of a drinking water supply system, including infrastructure related to source water, treatment, and water distribution
4. Use an asset management framework that helps decision makers determine how best to invest limited resources in renewing their water systems

According to the 2016 Canadian Infrastructure Report Card 29 per cent of the Canadian drinking water infrastructure, which is worth around $65 billion is rated fair, poor, very poor, or approaching the end of its usable life.

UBC Okanagan researchers are working with smaller municipalities in B.C. to use this new tool.

“It’s well known that in order to be able to manage something, you’ve got to be able to measure it,” said Sadiq.

“In the absence of useable benchmarks, we risk the minimum standards becoming a target to shoot for and we know that members of the municipal public service have much higher aspirations.”

The end goal is to create an association of smaller cities and towns around British Columbia and for those areas to create a performance assessment system, like the National Water and Wastewater Benchmarking initiative, which is used in larger cities.