Agency Program Setup and Execution

The California Safe Drinking Water Code, the California General Order Waste Discharge Requirements, and the federal National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits all emphasize the need for a programmatic approach to utility management. This requirement applies across water, wastewater, and stormwater sectors.

Too often, agencies find themselves stretched thin—managing increasing responsibilities with limited staff. This imbalance can lead to serious consequences, including Clean Water Act lawsuits or contaminated distribution systems.

At Ewers Engineering, we offer flexible, cafeteria-style services tailored to your agency’s needs—whether that means turnkey program design and implementation, or assistance with a single issue. We support your team from concept through execution with services such as:

  • Municipal Code Review – Ensuring codes are current, compliant, and free of internal conflicts.

  • Program Plan Development – From initial planning through to final implementation.

  • Work Planning – Helping predict staffing needs and streamline outsourcing.

  • Program Software Selection – Identifying tools for remote data input, FSE mailings, and more.

  • Communications Planning – Designing outreach strategies to improve public engagement and transparency.

TURNKEY MANAGEMENT Solutions

Hiring new personnel for specialized programs—such as FOG (Fats, Oils, and Grease) control or Force Main Condition Assessment—isn’t always feasible. Staff turnover can further disrupt continuity and dilute long-term goals.

That’s where we come in. Ewers Engineering partners with in-house champions to provide consistent program management and support. Our experienced staff can handle the day-to-day administrative tasks needed to maintain regulatory compliance and protect infrastructure.

If your agency needs a strategic plan, analytical insight, or a reliable in-house presence to support or launch a program, we’re here to help. We take pride in getting to know your team and your systems. Our depth of experience and community-focused approach can be the key to building lasting public support and successful programs.

Hydraulic modeling

Hydraulic modeling empowers agencies to understand system behavior under extreme conditions, evaluate failure consequences, explore water quality impacts, test potential solutions, plan capital improvements, and identify abnormal performance that may signal failure or system imbalances.

At Ewers Engineering, we’ve worked with hydraulic models since the early days of the technology and continue to support clients using the latest Geographic Information System (GIS)-driven platforms.

Model to target a specific problem

Hydraulic models have the flexibility to incorporate whole-system behaviors and dynamics, but often, we need a solution to a specific system element issue. Ewers Engineering works with agencies flexibly, minimizing the scope and effort to address what is needed and what results are useful.

Condition assessment practices to move to action

Condition assessment—the process of evaluating a facility’s physical state and estimating its remaining service life—can identify problems before they become failures, or worse, emergencies. Yet when utility staff can’t access or visually inspect a facility, assessment becomes difficult—and as a result, it’s often overlooked in water and wastewater system operations and maintenance. This gap in oversight is one of the main reasons underground pressure pipe deterioration has become a significant liability concern for both agencies and their insurers.

Force mains, in particular, present serious challenges. They are expensive to build, essential to collection and treatment systems, and often rely on unique materials and components not used elsewhere in the system. When they fail, they tend to fail catastrophically—posing major risks to public health, safety, and agency priorities. It’s no surprise that insurance pools are strongly encouraging agencies to better manage and assess these assets.

Water mains often serve to failure, and failures on high-consequence water mains tend to capture headlines. Do you remember the last water main that excavated an intersection in a few minutes, flooded nearby businesses, and wiped out service for adjacent utilities? Who doesn’t? It’s hard to forget.

What to do?

Ewers Engineering delivers a risk-based, systematic, and vendor-neutral approach to condition assessment. Our process is designed to minimize strain on agency resources while delivering the critical information needed to take effective action. Whether you're building a new program, tackling a specific project, or looking for a staff extension, we support agencies in:

  • Extending pipeline service life by identifying and addressing factors that accelerate deterioration, such as hydrogen sulfide buildup, pressure transients, and velocity/pressure imbalances.

  • Improving operational readiness through CMMS integration, work planning, and staff training.

  • Prioritizing investments based on risk, so the highest-consequence assets receive attention first.

  • Demonstrating regulatory compliance and management excellence, helping build public trust and meet Waste Discharge Requirements (WDRs).

  • Optimizing system design and performance by improving equipment selection (e.g., air/vacuum valves) and applying hydraulics-based troubleshooting.

  • Bridging O&M and engineering to ensure both sides of the house are coordinated, aligned, and contributing to long-term system health.

For critical pipelines that simply can’t be allowed to fail, we tailor our condition assessment programs to your agency’s specific needs, systems, and operational realities.

Let’s talk about your current approach—and how we can help you meet your goals with confidence.

Emergency Response Planning that works

We develop emergency response planning documents that implement National Incident Management Systems (NIMS)/Standardized Emergency Management Systems (SEMS) and standards, are system-specific, and ease responsiveness. Ewers Engineerings has completed emergency response documents for special districts and municipalities for water systems to comply with the 2018 America’s Water Infrastructure Act. Our core philosophy: Create action-oriented documentation so that the next Operations and Maintenance hire can successfully respond to emergencies.

Transparent decision-making for the hard stuff

Recently, we got a great question from a maintenance supervisor: Should maintenance (including condition assessment) be skipped in favor of simply replacing a pipeline? The prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars in maintenance on a pipeline that is well into its service life for much of its length is daunting. So is raising millions of dollars to replace the line and manage its replacement.

The same questions could then be posed for all large capital assets: “Why keep them?” and “When should they just be replaced?”.

The decision depends on multiple, often competing objectives. One approach (a common one) is to let the loudest, most intrusive matter get the resources, then clean up when necessary. That’s the approach that yields 20-MG sewage spills into a creek and storage tank ruptures. We advocate and support a different approach to difficult decisions. It’s based on some simple principles:

  • Make decisions repeatable and transparent. Establish the bases for decisions (define objectives and the metrics that support them), then collect and document the supporting information involved. If there’s a question about the decision, be able to roll back through the process quickly and efficiently. It helps with boards of directors, casual conversations with customers, and a good night’s sleep.

  • Integrate risk assessment. Though we humans are notoriously poor at off-the-cuff risk assessment, structured and standardized risk assessments translated into dollars lost work very well. At Ewers Engineering, we’ve independently calculated the cost of people in one town growing ill from water storage tank contamination, and the results are incredibly clarifying for the agency. Risk assessment is the reigning champion of decision-making tools - though it must be done well.

  • Adopt standards from other fields when needed. In building one decision support system for an agency, we adopted the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) valuation practices from private plant operations practices. Their factory operations standards and rules of thumb include O&M levels necessary for minimum future operations and for exiting the business. We used this to show the agency they were investing in their plant O&M as if they were planning on leaving the business soon. And they increased their O&M funding as a result.

Ewers Engineering makes the process easy for our clients. We develop detailed, realistic failure risk models that establish a clear path to understanding the benefit of complex capital assets throughout their life cycles. Our work develops decision support tools that provide repeatable, transparent, flexible, and systematic bases for decision-making around large capital asset life cycle investments. Their mathematical models allows us to provide graphics for presentation for risks, urgency, consequences, benefits, and failure likelihoods in maps, graphs, and logic diagrams for easy communication with boards of directors with a range of technical expertise.

They are oriented to answer these deceptively simple questions:

  • When should a pipeline asset be removed from service?

  • What is the maximum annual budget for maintenance activities, including condition assessment?

  • What is the best option for any particular capital asset: repair, replacement, rehabilitation, or refrain (do nothing)?

If you're asking the same questions or think that someone is going to ask these questions soon, consider developing a risk model as the first step to building a decision support tool.

Graphics make metrics so much more accessible for all levels of education! We use Geographical Information Systems in nearly all our projects because of this.

Managing the spikes in CIP management

Unmonitored Capital Improvement Programs (CIPs) notoriously slip into service of squeaky wheels. Whatever makes the most noise gets funding. Fortunately, most agencies watch their CIPs. They want to make sure things get done.

  • Prioritization - what gets done first - trips people up.

  • Management - how things get done - tends to catch people by surprise.

  • Cost - How much it costs to get things done - this changes yearly.

To serve the interests of the agency and its clients, Ewers Engineering developed a software tool to critical system elements quietly go belly-up, then have to be funded through expensive capitalization. When this happens, communities often lose their ability to adapt and begin a decades-long service to debt financing.

Better to evaluate the risk to the community or utility for each project, then prioritize the projects for funding from highest risk to lowest risk. This reveals what projects need funding and when. As a result, agencies can set aside money and staffing resources in anticipation of large needs.

That's exactly what we do with Risk Development (RD)/CIP, our proprietary CIP development software. RD/CIP allows agencies to build realistic project costs and timelines, prioritizes projects based on their modeled risk to the community. It also treats project cost, risk, and time as dynamic elements.

  • Project risk of failure increases if a project isn't funded by deadlines.

  • Project costs increase with an annual inflation rate or set of rates, avoiding the mistake of putting projects on the street based on out-of-date cost estimates.

Have you got a CIP that keeps funding the easy projects (even while important system elements reach the end of their service life)? If you want to implement an intelligent, systematic, and transparent approach to CIP prioritization, give us a call about licensing RD/CIP to provide ongoing CIP development.

Computerized Maintenance Management Systems

Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS’s) can iron out maintenance challenges by focusing maintenance effort on proactive activities, rather than reactive ones. But the real payoff for the considerable effort involved in transitioning to a CMMS lies in developing a logic that attacks the issues with the highest risk of failure first.

Ewers Engineering has developed a failure risk-based CMMS logic for flexible implementation across a range of platforms that permits maintenance effort through the full range of proactive maintenance practices: Reactive, preventive, predictive, reliability-centered.

No matter what phase your CMMS development is in, we develop the CMMS into a flexible, transparent system capable of preventive, predictive, and reliability-centered maintenance activities at multiple sites.

This is a good time to undertake CMMS development because GIS-based CMMS has become a flexible commodity that can be developed with much less expense and more capability than was available as little as five years ago.

If your agency is developing the base data for a CMMS, consider maximizing the effectiveness of the result at this transition period. This is a time- and labor-intensive process. If it is structured well, this initial effort can develop a CMMS that can not only produce work orders and track completions, critical parts and supplies, and labor, but can be used to develop the data necessary for effective predictive maintenance practices like oil assessment, thermography, and vibration monitoring that can significantly extend the lifespan of large capital-intensive facilities. In addition, as operations and maintenance staff develop their skills with these advanced maintenance practices, staff culture of improvement tends to increase.