WCW26

Municipalities across Canada face the same challenge: thousands of aging sewer assets, inconsistent inspection records, scattered data systems, and limited budgets for renewal. The Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB) tackled these issues by developing a transparent, replicable risk‑based condition assessment framework that any municipality—large or small—can adopt.
In its inaugural year of it's five-year program, transformed 48 km of CCTV inspections and 700 MACP manhole scans into a unified, easy‑to‑communicate asset condition story. Using standardized NASSCO Inc.© (NASSCO) Pipeline Assessment Certification Program ™ (PACP) and Manhole Assessment Certification Program ™ (MACP) defect coding as the foundation, the team applied a structured (Water Research centre’s Sewerage Risk Management approach), using a Structural Performance Grade (SPG) workflow, that translates raw observations into a clear, defensible “likelihood‑of‑failure” score. This score is then combined with a four‑index discretized Consequence of Failure (CoF) model to produce a risk‑ranked inventory that municipal leaders can use for capital planning, budgeting, and Council reporting.


What makes this approach attractive to municipalities is its repeatability and practicality. The SPG model accounts for real‑world field conditions that engages the pipe’s internal condition grade with soil behaviour, surcharge evidence, corrosion potential, and construction impacts, while remaining simple enough for operators, engineers, asset managers, and decision‑makers to understand. By standardizing the process, asset owners minimize subjectivity and create a consistent pipeline of priority‑based work orders, from early trenchless opportunities to urgent repairs.


The first‑year implementation produced an actionable rehabilitation program: a $6.2M sewer backlog and $472k manhole program, later refined into a targeted high‑risk package of approximately $1.75M—a format any municipality can emulate to justify investment and sequence renewal.


This paper demonstrates how municipalities can move from fragmented inspections to a defensible, risk‑driven capital plan within a single inspection cycle, offering a proven roadmap for communities seeking transparency, efficiency, and long‑term sustainability in their wastewater asset management programs.