Is this Climate Change? - Experiences that are Increasing our Resilience
Annual Conference
❄
The Nelson Regional Sewerage Business Unit (NRSBU) operates the Bell Island wastewater treatment system, and regional wastewater infrastructure. The business unit has had an ongoing focus on resilience and over the last 10 years has invested in infrastructure to accommodate growth, and to mitigate issues with potential disasters, and to mitigate climate change.
The NRSBU resilience work has been tested over 2018 and 2019 by various climatic events, and the issues that have arisen from the events have shown that while NRSBU identified the potential issues associated with many events, our planning has not fully identified secondary effects of these events very well and we have not allowed for the implications of these secondary effects on our infrastructure.
The specific events we examine here are the effects of ex tropical cyclones Fehi and Gita in early 2018 and the drought and subsequent fires that have affected the Nelson region in early 2019.
This paper summarises some of the issues NRSBU has faced, and how our assets have fared and also considers the issues identified during, or because of, the climatic events of 2018/2019.
The paper will outline several secondary effects that were not considered in the initial risk assessments and will discuss the implications that these could have on the system in the future. The effects relate not only to assets, but also to operation and maintenance activities, and to our biosolids disposal system. Some of effects identified could have significant financial implications and NRSBU will have to balance the extra investment against the additional system resilience which is gained.
In this instance, the climatic events have acted as an unwelcome, but valuable stimulus for NRSBU to undertake a broader consideration of risk and resilience and has assisted to highlight the issues in time for NRSBU to mitigate them. NRSBU believes that its increased understanding of the primary and secondary effects of events associated with climate change and our processes to plan for them will be improved as a result.