Development of a Defensible Pump Station CIP Based on Sound Asset Management Principles

The City of Virginia Beach Department of Public Utilities (City) provides sanitary sewer services to over 425,000 citizens within the City of Virginia Beach. The sanitary sewer system is comprised of over 404 sewer pumping/lift stations, more than 1,780 miles of gravity sewer lines and more than 190 miles of sewer force mains, and conveys an average of 35 million gallons of wastewater per day.Like most utilities, the City has faced a funding challenge of having growing aging infrastructure needs that exceed available resources. The City needed a way to prioritize their needs based on the limited available funding and decided to develop a consistent, defensible, repeatable approach by which it could prepare a prioritized pump station capital improvement program (CIP) grounded in widely accepted asset management principles, institutional knowledge of assets and failure histories, and asset condition. With support from Brown and Caldwell, the City developed a pump station criticality model and conducted a condition assessment of the pump stations. The outcome was a prioritized list of candidate capital improvement projects for pump station refurbishment and replacement.