Managing Stormwater Facilities in the Arid West: Implementation of Coachella Valley Water District's Asset Management Program

Regional flooding has been controlled within the Coachella Valley in Southern California since 1915, with existing facilities built or improved in the 1970s following severe floods. The Coachella Valley Water District provides stormwater protection for a 590 square mile area within the valley by using approximately 135 miles of channels along with a number of dikes and retention basins that can convey approximately 80,000 cubic feet per second of flow from the surrounding mountains into the Whitewater River. In 2017, the District partnered with Black & Veatch to launch an extensive asset inventory and support implementation of their asset management system. This presentation will show how the rapid growth of CVWD's asset management system has benefited their stormwater management program by: 1) Showing the importance of data structuring and establishing a data collection protocol for a successful asset management program. 2) Engaging stakeholders across their business to create an expansive and robust registry which supports current and future programs. 3) Providing data to justify capital improvements and preventative maintenance decisions; shifting away from reactive maintenance and developing defendable investment prioritization. The Project has completed a field-based inventory, baseline full-system condition assessment, development of risk-based prioritization criteria, and mapping business processes. The stormwater assets were collected over a 4-week field effort with zero injuries. To execute these efforts, Black & Veatch leveraged an off-the-shelf ESRI product tailored so the final asset inventory seamlessly integrated with the District's CMMS software. CVWD staff were involved in each step of the project, helping structure data hierarchies and dictionaries, collecting field data, and incorporating institutional knowledge into business process mapping and prioritization criteria development. Data management was key as the final inventory contained over 80,000 data points including sub-meter accuracy GPS coordinates, field documented asset specifications, over 1,500 photographs, opinions of replacement costs, and baseline likelihood of failure and consequence of failure criteria. Post collection, the District's forces now have verified asset locations and attributes that provide reliability to day to day efforts. Scalability was built into the implementation to support on-going and future development of the asset management system.