We think big ideas and back them up with practical solutions.
Read our articles, opinions and academic papers covering water policy, regulation, governance, risk mitigation, asset management and operations - written for our peers, utility managers and policy makers.
There are many opportunities for women wanting to become engineers, but they need to be fearless about being the only woman in the room.
Dr Annalisa Contos speaks to the Australian Financial review about the challenges and rewards of a career in engineering.
A project was run to track the reintroduction of fluoride to the Parkes Shire Council water distribution system. The tracer study provided insight into system operation, verified the disinfection critical control point and identified opportunities for improvement in system understanding.
Water engineer Dr Annalisa Contos has been a trailblazer for women in STEM and the utilities sector, and she’s finally being recognised for her work.
Setting control limits statistically ensures that data that requires attention is highlighted to the operator to ensure action can be taken to prevent breach of CCPs or licence limits and allows continuous improvement over time.
Water quality studies on the 148 km B-section pipeline including the development of P&IDs, an EPANET model and chlorine decay studies investigated improvements to the systems. Operational risk associated with the installation of a new rechlorinator were assessed and mitigation measures developed.
This case study examined whether public health risks from a local government operated recycled water scheme were appropriately managed through treatment and non-treatment barriers (end user controls). The pathogen log10 reduction requirements for recycled water for a mix of uses including food crop and municipal irrigation were determined. The four recycled water plants were verified to assess if they were meeting these requirements and whether the non-treatment barriers (end user controls) were adequate
This case study shows how to determine the required pathogen reductions for the reuse of effluent for irrigation of sports fields, golf course and community open spaces and select and design the appropriate process units to achieve the necessary pathogen reduction.
This research undertaken by Natalie Crawford can help utilities to identify and assess the extent of microbiological contamination risk from pipeline renewal and repair works and identify measures to manage these risks.
Human error is often cited as root cause of incidents and accidents. In this talk Dr Contos introduces key topics within the field of human factors. The talk addresses the environmental, organisational and job factors as well as human and individual characteristics, which influence behaviour at work in a way which can affect health and safety. Drawing from examples in the water industry Dr Contos discusses how human factors are important to both process and product safety.
This information sheet explains how threat-consequence or bow-tie diagrams can be used for visual risk analysis. Bow tie diagrams describe the pathways of a risk from its cause to its consequence and illustrate the barriers in place to reduce the risk (ISO/IEC 31010, 2009). The strength of bow-tie diagrams is that it goes beyond the usual risk assessment ‘snapshot’ and highlights the links between the threat, its consequences, the barriers preventing the consequence from occurring and the strengths of these barriers. In its full application it can be used to demonstrate the linkages between the barriers and the underlying management system. The highly visual nature of the diagrams are well-suited to communicating risk issues to non-specialists.
Although human factors have been shown to be the origin of many accidents in the water industry, they are rarely formally recognised in their approaches to water quality risk management. This paper, present by Dr Annalisa Contos at Ozwater 2015 provides a discussion for as to why human factors are not considered, which industries do recognise them and how this can be and should be incorporated into the water industry.
This paper expands on the duties of directors and overarching corporate governance management for statutory owned corporations (SOCs) in the context of risk management. SOCs need to fully understand their operating context if they are to holistically understand and manage risks. The ‘Frameworks’ within contemporary Australian water cycle guidance, such as the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines, note that enterprises must understand their water ‘products’ from catchment to consumer to ensure that risks are properly identified and managed.
