Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING FOR DEVELOPMENT: APPLICATIONS AND INFRASTRUCTUREin the water infrastructure threatens the quality and reliabilityof all water services.In particular there has been little or no management and maintenanceof underground infrastructure. A large proportion ofthis infrastructure is over one hundred years old, placing it atincreased risk for leaks, blockages and malfunctions due todeterioration. For example, water mains break in hundreds ofthousands of locations each year in the United States, leavingwater customers without a supply, or with a supply that isunsafe for consumption without special treatment (i.e. boilingor chlorination).The escalating deterioration of water and sewer systemsthreatens our ability to provide safe drinking water and essentialsanitation services for current and future generations. Asthe pipes crumble and leak, many cities are faced with anexpensive water and sewer problem. The longer these problemsgo unresolved, the more serious they become, placingvital public assets at risk of further degradation and posingan unacceptable risk to human health and the environment,damaging public and private property, and impacting stateand local economies.The cost of rehabilitation of water infrastructure systems isincreasing substantially across the world due to their acceleratingdeterioration. European cities are spending in the orderof €5 billion per year on wastewater network rehabilitation.The United Kingdom has over 700,000 kilometres of mainssupply and sewer pipes, and is implementing over 35,000maintenance works per month on these pipes. A 5 per centreduction in costs there would save over £20 million (Vahala,2004). 150 In the same way, many of the infrastructure systemsin Canada and the United States, worth trillions of dollars,are failing prematurely and are in need of costly repairs. Theestimated capital needed for the rehabilitation of main urbanwater and sewer pipes, older than fifty years and in fifty largestcities of the USA, is more than US$700 billion (Yan & Vairavamoothy,2003). 151 It will be increased significantly over thecoming decades due to the combined effect of infrastructureageing, urbanization and climate change, and therefore placinga huge burden on future generations.These deterioration processes are more severe in developingcountries, due to ageing of the systems, poor constructionpractices, little or no maintenance and rehabilitation activities,operation at higher capacity than designed for, and so on.There is little knowledge about specific classes of asset deterioration,the technical service life and insufficient data to know150 Vahala, R. 2004. European Vision for Water Supply and Sanitation in 2030. Water Supplyand Sanitation Technology Platform.151 Yan, J. M., and Vairavamoothy, K. 2003. Fuzzy Approach for the Pipe Condition Assessment.Paper presented at the ASCE international conference on pipeline engineeringand construction, July 13–16, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 2, p.1817.the extent and/or value of their infrastructure assets. Furthermore,there are no efficient decision support tools availableto infrastructure managers and decision-makers (Misiunas,2005). 152Infrastructure deterioration will impact public health, environmentand institutions, including governments. Higher ratesof the water leakage means higher water losses and higherchances of infiltration and exfiltration of water. This will raisethe chances of drinking water contamination and the outbreakof waterborne diseases. The frequent breakdown of services,and therefore reduced water service quality and standards, willaffect the willingness of consumers to pay water bills.ConclusionThere is an urgent need for planned action to manage waterresources effectively. The problems in urban areas of developingcountries are of particular concern as still large sectionsof the community are living without a safe water supply andbasic sanitation services. It has been widely acknowledged thatin the past, several urban water interventions (particularly indeveloping countries) have failed and this has been in part dueto little or no attention given to the institutional landscapewithin which these interventions are applied, and the lack ofstakeholder involvement in the development and implementationof these interventions.The adequate provision of an urban water supply and sanitationis likely to become more difficult in the future due toseveral change pressures such as urbanization, climate changeand infrastructure deterioration. The challenge is to developappropriate technical and institutional responses to thesepressures that radically change the way in which urban watersystems are managed. Interventions must be considered overthe entire urban water cycle, recognizing interactions betweenthe various components of the urban water system. Theremust also be a rethink of the way water is used and reusedand the greater use of natural systems for treatment (that arelikely to be more effective against emerging contaminants).The objective must be to develop urban water systems thatare more robust and resilient against these uncertain futurepressures.To achieve this, appropriate engineering innovations and solutionswill need to be developed. However, to ensure maximumimpact of these innovations and solutions, they mustbe coupled with components of institutional development(through capacity-building activities), and greater stakeholderinvolvement, particularly with the engineers and the consumersthemselves. Clearly, only if these components are includedin the solutions will the process be able to substantially con-152 Misiunas, D. 2005. Failure Monitoring and Asset condition assessment in water supplysystems. PhD Thesis, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.287