OCWA Vulnerability Assessment

What was the Challenge?

The Onondaga County Water Authority (OCWA), Central New York’s Water Authority, is one of the largest public water suppliers in New York State serving a five county area including portions of Onondaga, Oswego, Madison, Cayuga, and Oneida County as shown in the service area map.

OCWA was faced with the challenge of conducting vulnerability assessments on their tens of thousands of assets in order to comply with the requirements of America’s Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA) which was passed and signed into law on October 23, 2018. As a community water system serving more than 3,300 people, OCWA was required to conduct a risk and resilience assessment (RRA) and prepare or revise an emergency response plan, both of which needed to be reviewed and updated every five years moving forward.

How did Barton & Loguidice provide a solution?

The solution needed to be efficient, well documented, and repeatable to ensure OCWA would be compliant well into the future.

In order to meet the requirements of the AWIA and manage the shear amount of assessments that would need to be conducted, it was decided to complete the vulnerability assessments on a location basis rather than asset basis, reducing the number of individual records that would need to be recorded, maintained, and updated on a regular basis.

Why was the project a success?

What better way to document their risk and resiliency assessments than with the enterprise asset management system that was already housing the majority of their asset data – IBM Maximo. As part of the project, Barton & Loguidice designed configurations in Maximo to support the requirements of the AWIA. They included:

• A relationship between assets and sites;
• Risk scoring (consequence, likelihood and countermeasures);
• Countermeasure assessments;
• Follow-up work orders; and
• Reporting.

The vulnerability assessments resulted in a comprehensive list of follow-up actions, ranked in order of risk. From this information and the associated business processes, OCWA is able to create work orders for small tasks and begin planning capital projects for larger ones to reduce the vulnerability of their assets. The close collaboration between B&L and OCWA helped pave the way for a manageable and repeatable vulnerability assessment process that will help OCWA stay compliant with the AWIA for years to come.