Water infrastructure resilience

Water utilities are facing increasing pressure from aging infrastructure, funding constraints, climate change and cybersecurity risks. Ahead of her WEFTEC presentation, Sarah Lingley shares lessons from major infrastructure rehabilitation projects and explains how proactive investment, adaptive design and long-term planning can help build more resilient water systems.

Key takeaways

Proactive infrastructure renewal helps reduce risk, manage long-term costs and improve resilience.

Climate change is reshaping water availability and infrastructure planning requirements.

Sustainable funding mechanisms are essential to support critical water investments.

United States | Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Reading Time : 5 minutes

From technical specialist to water leader

Sarah Lingley discovered her passion for water infrastructure while working on a drinking water treatment facility upgrade early in her career. Today, she serves as Oregon Water Business Lead for WSP, combining business leadership with project delivery on major pipeline and trenchless infrastructure programs. She coordinates multidisciplinary teams and helps clients navigate technical, permitting and stakeholder challenges.

Early in my career, I had the opportunity to work on five UV disinfection retrofit projects for water treatment facilities. These were retrofit projects, so success went beyond just meeting manufacturer requirements or design standards. It required understanding how operators would actually use and maintain the equipment within existing facilities.

Designing for uncertainty

At WEFTEC, Lingley will present “From Risk to Resilience: Design and Construction Lessons from Portland's Carolina Sewer Trunk Rehabilitation Project.” The session explores the rehabilitation of a 90-year-old sewer beneath Interstate 5 in Oregon and highlights how adaptive design and collaborative delivery can help manage project risk while supporting long-term resilience.

Using a Construction Manager/General Contractor delivery approach, the client, contractor and engineering team worked together to rehabilitate a critical asset. The resulting solution was designed to reduce implementation risks, facilitate future maintenance and support reliable long-term performance.

Most water utilities already have a strong understanding of their needs, so the challenge is not determining what needs to be done, but rather how to pay for it.

Adapting to a changing climate

Lingley believes proactive rehabilitation and replacement programs can help utilities avoid the higher costs associated with emergency failures. Reliable water infrastructure remains fundamental to public health, environmental protection and economic growth.

Funding programs such as Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loans, State Revolving Funds and other state and federal initiatives provide valuable support, but many utilities continue to face funding gaps. Expanding sustainable funding mechanisms can help utilities make strategic, long-term investments.

At the same time, climate change is altering groundwater availability, rainfall patterns and other environmental conditions that many systems were originally designed around. Utilities must balance infrastructure upgrades, operational changes and long-term planning while managing financial pressures.

Protecting connected water systems

An engineering outreach event showed Lingley how little many people understand about the complexity of water systems. Treatment plants, reservoirs, pump stations, transmission mains and distribution networks all work together to deliver reliable service, yet their importance often goes unnoticed.

Increasing public awareness can help communities better understand the investment required to maintain and replace aging infrastructure while supporting reliable water services for future generations.

Lingley's work supporting utilities with America's Water Infrastructure Act compliance assessments also highlighted the growing importance of cybersecurity. As water systems become increasingly automated and connected, protecting operational technology and control systems is becoming a critical part of utility resilience.

As water systems become increasingly automated and reliant on digital technologies, protecting operational technology and control systems becomes critical.

Building resilience for future generations

As water utilities face evolving challenges, Lingley remains committed to helping communities improve resilience. Whether supporting drinking water or wastewater systems, she believes infrastructure investments can deliver lasting benefits for public health, environmental protection and community wellbeing.