Power Outages Create Critical Risks for Water Utilities and Labs

At drinking water and wastewater plants, losing power can shut down pumping stations, halt treatment processes, and disable monitoring systems. Water testing labs also face vulnerabilities when electricity fails, including disrupted refrigeration and stalled analytical instruments. These threats underscore the urgent need for power resilience to safeguard public health and ensure regulatory compliance.

As grid reliability challenges intensify, water utilities and test labs require robust, actionable plans to continue operating safely even in the absence of electricity.

Drinking Water and Wastewater Systems Need Power for Compliant Operation

Major storms have repeatedly demonstrated how power loss can render treatment plants inoperable. For example, Hurricane Ida in 2021 knocked out power across Louisiana, leaving more than 600,000 people without clean water and forcing widespread boil-water advisories when treatment systems failed.

Electricity drives nearly every stage of drinking water and wastewater treatment. Drinking water systems need power for raw water intake, chemical dosing, filtration, disinfection, and pressurized distribution. Without power, these processes can stop entirely or work unreliably, increasing the risk of water quality violations or service outages.

Wastewater treatment plants are equally vulnerable to outages. Aeration systems require a significant amount of energy to maintain biological treatment. Pumps need power to move wastewater through multiple treatment stages, and disinfection systems depend on precise chemical dosing. A prolonged outage can result in the release of untreated or partially treated wastewater, which can harm the environment and violate permit conditions.

Water Laboratories Risk Being Unable to Ensure Safety

Drinking and wastewater treatment plants receive considerable attention in resilience planning, but there's more to consider. Labs play an equally important role in ensuring the distribution of safe water, yet many power contingency plans often overlook them.

Without reliable power, labs can lose the refrigeration needed to preserve samples, reagents, and control cultures. A power disruption can stop incubators and autoclaves mid-cycle, compromising sterility or culture growth. Analytical instruments typically lack meaningful battery backup and can shut down abruptly during an outage, delaying required compliance testing or invalidating runs in progress.

For utilities operating under regulatory frameworks, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act or the Clean Water Act, testing delays can lead to noncompliance. More importantly, failure to deliver timely, defensible water quality data means decision-makers may not have the information they need to issue advisories or adjust treatment processes in an emergency.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidance emphasizes that utility power resilience planning must explicitly include labs, not treat them as an afterthought.

Strategies Against Power Interruptions

To safeguard operations during power outages, utilities and labs should implement practical strategies that go beyond simply owning a generator. Some tactics for building resilience against power interruptions include:

• Backup power planning: Identify critical loads across facilities, including treatment facilities and laboratories. Ensure generators are correctly sized and wired to support these loads. For labs, this includes refrigerators, incubators, and essential analytical equipment.
• Fuel supply management: Maintain reliable fuel contracts or on-site reserves to ensure generators continue to run during extended outages. Assume that commercial fuel supplies will be limited in the case of an emergency.
• Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) integration and alerts: Configure SCADA systems to send immediate alerts when power is lost or when generators activate. This enables rapid responses from both plant operators and lab managers.
• Load prioritization: Map out essential and nonessential systems to ensure generator capacity supports critical functions. For labs, this might mean preserving cold storage for the sake of sample integrity.
• Staff training exercises: Conduct regular training and cross-team drills to help staff respond confidently and correctly during real emergencies. Document any emergency processes in written, hard copies accessible offline.
• Collaboration with officials: Coordinate with local emergency managers and authorities to align on and meet water sector needs. Community-wide emergency plans and power restoration priorities must integrate with lab operations.

EPA offers detailed recommendations to help water utilities and laboratories adopt these measures in an integrated resilience plan.

Safe Water Requires Energy and Resilience

As extreme weather, heatwaves, and aging grids persist, blackouts will continue to increase in frequency across the U.S. In the event of an electricity outage, water utilities and testing labs must prioritize power resilience to continue providing safe drinking water and treating wastewater. Without reliable electricity, safe water delivery, wastewater treatment, and essential testing can all grind to a halt, putting public health at risk on multiple fronts.

By investing in backup systems, securing fuel supplies, integrating lab operations into power plans, and training staff, you can ensure service continuity even when the grid fails. Doing so helps you uphold your promise to deliver safe and reliable water to the community at all times.