How resilient is your utility? Understanding where you are & how to move forward

Operational resilience is the ability to mitigate, prepare for, react to, and recover from unexpected events with minimal impact to normal operations. It’s becoming increasingly important, especially as hazards become more prevalent, costly, and likely to stem from supply chain disruptions or staffing constraints. However, resilience isn’t achieved through a single project or investment. Instead, it is the culmination of many coordinated decisions across planning, engineering, operations, and leadership.

If you’re among the thousands of utilities in the United States that serve more than 3,300 people, you’ve not only completed a risk and resilience assessment (RRA) and an emergency response plan (ERP), but you’ve also recertified (or are recertifying) those plans. These are important steps. It’s one way that your utility has identified risks and vulnerabilities and has developed a plan to respond to emergencies. It’s important, though, to treat this compliance as a milestone, not a destination.

What follows is a practical roadmap for reaching the next goalpost on the road to resilience, no matter where your utility is starting from.

The Stages of Resilience for Water Utilities

This guide uses a resilience maturity model, which recognizes that resilience develops gradually. Growth on this path can be categorized into stages.

• Level 0 – Low Resilience: Informal/Ad Hoc
  • In this stage, utilities often address operational risk informally. They don’t tie risk to capital improvement and rely on individual experience rather than documented procedures during emergencies.

• Level 1 – Early Resilience: Compliance-Driven/Reactive
  • Here, utilities begin to identify and prioritize hazards and develop compliance-based response plans, but they remain reactive to operational risk and do not revisit their resilience plans until required to.

• Level 2 – Risk-Aware: Focused on Cataloging and Planning
  • Here, utilities identify single points of failure, maintain a list of risks across organizations and disciplines (not just critical infrastructure, but also key business functions), and develop scenario-specific plans and procedures.

• Level 3 – Prepared: Prioritized on Managed Risk Reduction
  • In this stage, utilities actively work to reduce vulnerabilities through preparation and mitigation engineering. Examples include installing backup generators at critical pump stations, adding flood protection to low-lying facilities, or strengthening cybersecurity controls. Exercises become routine, and lessons learned inform future planning.

• Level 4 – Active: Marked by Enterprise-Wide/Integrated Resilience
  • Here, utilities integrate resilience into enterprise management processes, such as capital improvement plans that reflect operational risk priorities and cross-functional teams that coordinate infrastructure protection and emergency planning. Mitigation and preparedness become embedded in how the organization operates.

• Level 5 – Adaptive: Driven by Learning, Growing, and Optimizing
  • In this stage, utilities constantly adapt and optimize their plans, and implement change based on new experiences and new information.

Utilities move through these stages as they build on their previous work. The maturity model focuses on how consistently utilities incorporate resilience across different levels of decision-making, rather than simply measuring how many planning or compliance projects they have completed.

Where Most Utilities Are Today on Their Resilience Journey

Your utility is probably already on the path to resilience. Regulatory drivers like America’s Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA) have compelled drinking water utilities to prepare and certify RRAs and ERPs that identify hazards such as flooding, cyber intrusions, and seismic events. While wastewater utilities are not yet governed by AWIA, they are often driven by state regulations, discharge permit conditions, or local emergency planning requirements to develop strong operational awareness. Other risk, resilience, and sustainability projects, like asset management assessments, climate adaptation studies, and hazard and operability studies, are also important contributors.

This means that regulated drinking water utilities and many wastewater utilities have reached at least the early resilience stage, and many have reached higher levels of maturity.

Resilience Progress Happens One Step at a Time

Your utility doesn’t have to climb mountains to become more resilient. Achievable steps might look like:

• Convening leadership to review the findings of an RRA and briefing a governing board.

• Considering cost to benefit during planning and funding discussions.

• Implementing a project tied to a high-priority risk, like installing a generator at a critical pump station.

• Integrating operational risk considerations into capital planning.

The more actions you take, the more preparedness becomes ingrained in your culture and decision-making. These steps allow your utility to scale the mountain of resilience one step at a time.