Date
Monday, July 20, 2026
Time
2:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Location Name
Room 5, Level 2
Name
When One Pipe Carries It All: Rethinking Risk and Reliability
Track
Distribution
Description
The Boone Florence Water Commission (BFWC) purchases wholesale water from Greater Cincinnati Water Works (GCWW) for distribution to customers served by Boone County Water District (BCWD) and the City of Florence, Kentucky. BFWC receives treated water from GCWW through a transmission main that crosses beneath the Ohio River. From this crossing, water is conveyed to and through a pump station, which serve as the primary pumping facility for BFWC. Because BFWC lacks a fully redundant water supply, completing major work at the supply pump station is operationally challenging and presents unacceptable risks to system reliability.
Prior to the creation of BFWC, Northern Kentucky Water District (NKWD) served as the wholesale supplier to BCWD and the City of Florence. The interconnects and wholesale meters associated with this historical service relationship remain in place and now function as emergency connections. These interconnections provide an important, though limited, level of redundancy.
To address these challenges, Hazen and Sawyer partnered with BFWC to conduct a comprehensive vulnerability and risk assessment of the existing supply system. The purpose of the assessment was to identify the most significant risks associated with the current single-pipeline supply configuration, evaluate the operational and capital improvements necessary to mitigate those risks, and recommend long-term strategies to support system resilience, regulatory compliance, and projected growth over the next 20–30 years. The evaluation utilized an Excel-based analysis tool built around the AWWA J100-21 Risk and Resilience Management of Water and Wastewater Systems methodology. Under the J100 framework, risk (R) is defined as the product of consequence (C), vulnerability (V), and threat likelihood (T) for a given threat-asset (T-A) pair. Consequence is defined as the worst reasonably expected outcome if a threat occurs; vulnerability represents the probability that the full consequence would be realized; and threat likelihood reflects the annual probability of the threat. Risks were quantified for both human impacts—such as injuries or fatalities, monetized using USEPA-recommended valuations—and financial consequences associated with infrastructure damage, customer outages, or emergency response activities.
Potential countermeasures were evaluated for their ability to reduce system risk, improve operational flexibility, and enable planned outages at the Constance PS without loss of service. These options included construction of a secondary Ohio River crossing, installation of additional pumping and storage capacity, and enhanced supply capability from NKWD through upgraded or expanded interconnections. Each alternative was assessed for its risk-reduction benefits, capital and operating costs, constructability, and contribution to long-term system resilience.
This presentation will summarize the risk assessment framework used for this project but also demonstrate how other utilities can adopt a similar approach to identify the best countermeasure to advance to construction, considering the risk-mitigation potential and capital cost. The BFWC project will be used as an example to demonstrate the approach taken and summarize the key findings, and recommended strategies to support BFWC in maintaining a reliable water supply.
Speakers