Development And Application of Infrastructure Performance Metrics for Wastewater Systems in Upstate NY
The sewage pollution right to know act requires the reporting of sewage spills and leaks to the public. In New York this data is available in spreadsheet form for download from the NYSDEC website. Interpretation of this spreadsheet is difficult due to variability in structure and the detail of information provided by each municipality. The present work aims to quantify basic statistics and explore performance metrics of Reliability, Resilience, and Vulnerability (RRV) for sewage releases in Oneida county and the City of Utica. As defined, the RRV metrics provide perspective on the frequency, duration, and severity of sewage release events. From 2017-2022, 290 sewage release events occurred on 175 unique days. The overall reliability of the system was 92% meaning sewage releases occurred on 8% of the days between 2017-2022. 79% of sewage releases ended within a 24hr time period (24hr-resilience). Finally, the average release volume (vulnerability) was 3.15 million gallons. Considerable uncertainty in the data was noted, particularly as it pertains to sewage release volume or flow estimates provided.