From drought to deluge: how smart technologies help

Water is amongst the world’s most significant risks, making subsequent sustainable management and resilient infrastructure, operations and supply urgent priorities.

Indeed, despite decades of progress, more than 2.2-billion people around the world still do not have access to safely managed drinking water. Water security one of the defining infrastructure challenges of our time.

And South Africa’s water sector sits in an uncomfortable position; the catastrophic floods of April 2022 caused an estimated US$2 billion in infrastructure and business losses. Damaging flood events followed in the years after; at one water treatment plant, for example, roads that had been repaired after an earlier event were damaged again within months.

This is not simply a matter of bad luck or poor maintenance; it points to a more structural problem.  A lot of South Africa’s water and wastewater (WWW) infrastructure, like infrastructure elsewhere, was designed around historical rainfall records and flood-return assumptions that may no longer hold.

Therefore, a treatment works designed around an older one-in-50-year flood level may now face inundation more often than anticipated. Indeed, this between original design assumptions and a changing climate is one of the central engineering challenges facing the sector over the next decade.

Where the fragility shows itself

Flooding has been a hard but instructive teacher. Plants situated on or near rivers have seen pump stations and electrical rooms inundated, sometimes more than once in a single season. Access roads wash away, cutting operators off from the sites that need attention most urgently.

Sewer networks surcharge, pushing untreated effluent into waterways at precisely the moment ecological systems are already under stress from flood debris and erosion. None of this is unique to South Africa. What does seem distinctive, or at least under-appreciated, is how quickly costs compound when an under-designed asset fails repeatedly rather than once.

Each flood event resets the maintenance clock, diverts capital earmarked for upgrades into emergency repair, and erodes the institutional knowledge needed to run increasingly complex systems.

The operational and safety risks are also considerable when floodwater reaches a plant. In conventional air-insulated designs, water entering medium-voltage (MV) switchgear can create serious risks, including flashover, arcing and equipment failure that may endanger people nearby.

Here, operators may need to de-energise equipment as a precaution. While this protects workers, it can also take treatment capacity offline when communities need reliable water supplies most.

The reality is that traditional designs can leave operators facing a difficult choice between protecting people and equipment and keeping a plant running. Good engineering should help reduce that trade-off.

Equipment designed with water resilience in mind

Switchgear design should be part of the resilience conversation. Schneider Electric’s PremSet MV switchgear range uses a shielded solid-insulation system (SSIS). Its design helps protect live conductors from exposure to moisture, offering a different approach from conventional air-insulated equipment, which requires suitable environmental conditions to operate safely.

Switchgear alone cannot solve the problem of flooding; however, it can be a weak link that turns a plant affected by flooding into one that is offline for weeks. Flood-resilient switchgear can help strengthen that link, provided it is specified and installed in line with the site’s conditions and the equipment’s operating requirements 

Seeing the plant when you cannot reach it

Equipment that survives the water is only half the resilience equation. The other half is knowing what is happening inside the plant while it is still happening, particularly when access roads are cut and staff cannot physically reach a site.

Through SCADA platforms such as Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Geo SCADA Expert, telemetry-enabled remote terminal units, and sensor networks, digital monitoring and automation systems provide real-time visibility into asset condition.

Operators can remotely monitor a wide range of parameters, from water levels and pump status to switchgear temperature and partial discharge, without needing to be physically present on site.

That visibility also changes the nature of decision-making during a flood event: instead of discovering a failure once it has already happened, operators can watch conditions degrade and intervene, whether that means switching to backup power, isolating a section of network, or simply scheduling a generator before the grid connection is lost.

Additionally, predictive maintenance built on this same data can also help ease South Africa’s well-documented shortage of skilled water engineers, by allowing fewer experienced staff to support more sites remotely rather than physically inspecting each one in turn.

In the end, the future of water infrastructure will be defined not by how assets perform under normal conditions, but by how effectively they withstand disruption. Utilities that invest resilient equipment, intelligent monitoring and operational readiness will be better positioned to protect essential services, safeguard communities and navigate an increasingly an uncertain climate future.