Missions, equipment, and the well-being and safety of people on Department of Defense (DoD) installations depend on access to water systems. An understanding of the resilience of water systems to disruption is not well known across the DoD. The objective of this project is to enable the identification of water resilience gaps. The project team will do this by developing and piloting a water resilience assessment (WRA) to evaluate the risks to critical missions on DoD installations due to disruptions to the water distribution system. The WRA will provide the pilot installations with a report documenting gaps and actionable  options to improve their water resilience. The WRA will also include a system analysis to identify technology and policy gaps and proactive solutions in water resilience to more widely improve water resilience for DoD installation across the Military Departments.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory will leverage the deep experience developing, conducting, and overseeing various energy resilience assessments and exercises to develop a methodology to perform water resilience assessments. WRAs will include analysis, risk identification, scenario development, tabletop exercises, and reporting. This will be enabled by a data call, virtual meetings, one or more site visits, an in-person tabletop exercise, and a system analysis, all of which can be conducted with or in parallel to the Energy Resilience Readiness Exercise (ERRE) process.

The pilot WRA will be a close collaboration with installation personnel to produce actionable findings for the installation and to develop a technology and process roadmap for the DoD. The assessments will accelerate Service-led efforts by expanding installation water resilience capabilities through collaborating and sharing lessons-learned and resources with the Service efforts. The generalized WRA process can be scaled for deployment across additional military installations and Services as previously demonstrated by the ERRE program.

The estimated return on investment and lifecycle cost-advantage for the project will depend on the specific findings of the pilot WRA. Similar to prior installation resilience work, WRAs will facilitate stakeholder alignment, vulnerability and gap identification, and risk reduction that can improve mission uptime and readiness. (Anticipated Project Completion - 2026)

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This material is based upon work supported by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering under Air Force Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.