Safeguarding Reliable Water Service In The Face Of Uncertainty

By Andy Yang

Among California’s many natural wonders, clean drinking water is the state’s most precious resource. If you follow the headlines, you’d be justified in feeling like this resource is under imminent threat — from drought, wildfire, cyberattacks, contaminants, even AI data centers.

Potential threats to water may be formidable, but we’re not defenseless against them. Modern water systems and utilities protect water resources and ensure reliable service in the face of uncertainty with disciplined, data-driven asset management.

“Asset management” may sound like some abstract framework for wheeling and dealing in the world of finance, but it’s really just a practical methodology for managing complexity. Behind every glass of tap water is a complex system of natural sources, pipes, pumps, filters, tanks, hydrants, and multitudes of additional interconnected infrastructure and technologies. All of it has to be monitored, maintained, upgraded, or replaced at the right time to ensure reliable service for communities regardless of threats and changing circumstances. For a water utility, getting that balance right is what asset management is all about.

Balancing Act

Water system assets are managed by continuously weighing cost, risk, and service level. Replace infrastructure too late, and the risk of failure climbs. Replace it too early, and money that could go toward other pressing priorities gets spent unnecessarily. Both errors carry the potential to disrupt service and/or increase costs.

This balancing act plays out across thousands of individual assets, from meters and mains to tanks and reservoirs. Rather than applying a single blanket maintenance scheduling approach to everything a utility owns, each asset is assessed for its likelihood of failure and — importantly — the ripple effects of such a failure. The goal isn’t to treat every asset equally, but to strategically direct effort where it matters most to optimize reliability.

This approach borrows heavily from the reliability-centered maintenance practices first developed in aviation in the 1960s. Once aircraft engineers stopped maintaining everything on a fixed schedule and instead applied strategic maintenance informed by asset function, risk, and consequence — plane failure rates dropped dramatically. The aviation industry was transformed by a simple but powerful insight: Treating everything the same isn’t safer, it’s actually less effective because it spreads attention away from what truly keeps a system running.

Surprising Sources Of Risk

Most people understand the risk of under-investing in an important asset: Drive around with bald tires on your car long enough and something bad will happen. Fewer people recognize the danger of over-investing in an asset. Servicing or replacing equipment more often than necessary doesn’t just waste money — it also increases the risk of introducing new problems into a system that was working fine. 

This is precisely why an asset-specific strategy matters. A water system with thousands of components can’t be managed effectively with a one-size-fits-all playbook. For customers, particularly in a high-cost-of-living state like California, discipline directly impacts affordability. Every dollar spent replacing or maintaining an asset that didn’t need this is a dollar that isn’t available for infrastructure that does.

Predictive Beats Reactive

Perhaps the clearest illustration of strategic asset management in action is the shift from reactive to predictive maintenance. Traditionally, utilities waited for a pump to fail before repairing it. Today, sensors monitoring vibration, temperature, and power data can flag the earliest signs of a developing problem — often months before failure would otherwise occur.

The difference is significant. A pump malfunction caught early might require only an inexpensive bearing replacement rather than a costly overhaul or full replacement. Predictive maintenance also means fewer emergency repairs, less overtime spend, and reduced risk of work injury. The same principle applies to leak detection: Acoustic sensors can identify a small leak — that might otherwise go unnoticed — before it grows into a catastrophic pipe burst that wastes water and disrupts service.

Asset management is never static — it has to adapt to changing conditions. Factors such as population growth, evolving weather conditions, and increasing wildfire severity continually reshape a utility’s risk profile over time. A watershed in forested, mountainous terrain that backs up to a densely populated urban area, for example, carries elevated risk for wildfire impact on both the watershed itself and the infrastructure connected to it. Recent, high-profile wildfires have made communities acutely aware of these risks, which makes it all the more important for utilities to communicate how their asset management strategies are adapting to address them.

Adaptation Is A Process

Evolving technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly part of our toolkit (we use them along with sensors to maintain optimal pump performance and predict and prioritize main replacement to prevent failure, for example). But these technologies are only as good as the data feeding them. A predictive asset management model built on incomplete or inaccurate records won’t deliver reliable results. 

It may come as a surprise, but many water companies — including some large, well-established ones — don’t have a complete picture of their assets, a map of exactly where every pipe runs, or know what kind of pumps and tanks and fittings are in service at a given time. That’s not a failure of effort so much as a legacy of decades operating with paper-based recordkeeping processes, carbon-copy service ticketing systems, and dated information technology.

Building accurate and accessible asset data streams takes sustained investment — surveying infrastructure, digitizing records, and maintaining collection as systems evolve. Utilities with strong data foundations can then translate predictive analytics and advanced risk models into more sustainable and efficient day-to-day operations.

Strategy In Practice

Asset management in practice pairs rigor with every component of infrastructure in service of one simple outcome: When a customer turns on the tap, clean water comes out — reliably and affordably and regardless of whatever is trending in the news. By systematically balancing cost, risk, and service level — and building the data foundation needed to make smart, proactive decisions — water systems can prepare for threats, modernize responsibly, adapt to change, and earn the trust of the communities they serve.

Andy Yang is the Director of Asset Management at San Jose Water.