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Bridging the Water Infrastructure Gap 

In a rare and dramatic showdown, Congress voted to override a presidential veto of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) in November 2007—the first such veto override in more than a decade.

The WRDA, which authorizes $23 billion to fund major water infrastructure programs across the United States, had failed three times since it was last passed in 2000. This time it was different. With the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina and the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse still fresh in the public’s mind, congressional leaders voted to invest in bridging our “Infrastructure Gap”—the gap between infrastructure needs and the resources that governments have invested in meeting those needs.

Instead of waiting for federal support, many cities and states across the country have started taking issues into their own hands, funding repairs and expansions through state and local bond referendums or with the support of innovative new public/private partnerships.

Even before the passage of the Federal stimulus package, WRDA gave Congress the authority to develop appropriations to fund hundreds of U. S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) projects—such as dams, levees, navigation locks, and water/wastewater treatment facilities—as well as Gulf Coast and Florida Everglades restoration efforts, among other water resources projects.

Over the coming years, governments and communities across the United States will need to spend more than $1 trillion to rehabilitate and expand its aging water infrastructure and meet the needs of a growing population. Tetra Tech’s expertise and longstanding history in supporting the nation’s critical infrastructure puts us in a competitive position for this expanding market.

Dams
Our nation’s dams are aging quickly. Currently 25 percent of the 79,000 dams in the United States are more than 50 years old, and by the year 2020 that statistic will rise to 85 percent.

Tetra Tech expertise includes dam failure analyses and inundation mapping; rehabilitation of existing dams; Federal Energy Regulatory Commission relicensing; design of new dams and reservoirs; and dam decommissioning.

Tetra Tech performed the planning, design, and construction management for the removal of Goldsborough Dam in Washington—an obsolete, 35-foot-high dam that disrupted the passage of salmon. Tetra Tech has also worked with USACE and Ventura County in California on the feasibility of removing Matilija Dam, which would be the largest dam to be decommissioned in the United States.

Levees
The WRDA bill includes authorizations for important levee rehabilitation programs that have languished over the past seven years. The integrity of many of these flood control structures has suffered from a lack of attention—in California’s Central Valley, for example, levees are considered to have a lower level of flood protection than those that failed in Hurricane Katrina.

Tetra Tech has assisted USACE with a variety of levee projects, conducting inspections of federally designed and constructed levees; developing hydraulic and economic models to evaluate the effectiveness of existing levee systems; and designing new levees that meet the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) criteria for certification.

Some of the most visible levee-related work Tetra Tech is doing involves restoration in areas of Louisiana affected by Hurricane Katrina, including on-site NEPA support. We are involved with two large USACE projects for the design of water control structures, levees, and pump stations to help protect local parishes from storm surges and to minimize the local risk of flooding.

Tetra Tech is also supporting levee work across the western United States. For the USACE, Seattle District, Tetra Tech is inspecting non-federally constructed levees and developing a GIS database to help organize and manage inventory data. Since the inception of the project, 163 levees in Washington, Idaho, and Montana have been inspected on 23 major rivers. For Riverside, San Bernardino, and Orange counties in California, Tetra Tech provides levee certification services that help ensure structures meet FEMA criteria.

Water and wastewater
The U.S. wastewater infrastructure business boomed in the 1970s and 1980s as the federal government funded projects through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Clean Water Act Construction Grants Program. But over the past two decades, the need for infrastructure rehabilitation and expansion has far surpassed availability of funding. In fact, funding under EPA’s construction grants programs was significantly cut back over this period. Oversight bodies expressed the need for additional funding for both water and wastewater needs, which is now being addressed by the Federal stimulus package.

Every four years, EPA provides its Clean Watersheds Needs Survey and Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment to Congress for review. Tetra Tech conducts the clean Watershed Needs Survey and generates the report to Congress under contract to EPA.

Many state and local governments stepped up to help make sure that clean water is delivered where it is needed most—despite reduced federal funding before the stimulus bill. Some communities have even initiated public/private partnerships for water resources projects—partnerships under which a private company brings financing and constructs or operates a project for a public agency.

Bridging the water infrastructure gap
As Engineering News-Record’s number one ranked water firm seven years in a row, Tetra Tech has been a major player in the U.S. water and wastewater consulting services market. We’ve been successful by working across a diverse client base—including federal, state, and local governments—to deliver solutions in a tight funding market.

The WRDA has helped provide much-needed momentum to help federal, state, and local governments to commit funds to major water system restoration and flood control projects across the United States. With this support, Tetra Tech will continue to provide design-build services, inspections, geotechnical engineering, and water resources planning and engineering to help bridge the infrastructure gap.