This book addresses the long-term maintenance, repair, and replacement of public infrastructure in a practical, cost effective manner-something that is missing in the current literature. Fixing our public infrastructure is essential for public health and safety and is fast becoming a national priority. This title provides an overview of the major public works infrastructure systems (water, sanitary sewer, stormwater, roads, bridges, and railways), including components, operational goals, maintenance, areas where failure can occur, and ways to address failure. Risk and vulnerability to these systems are evaluated and guidance on how to create a condition index (assessment), given limited data, is provided. It also includes statistical methods to make an assessment more robust. Recommendations on budgeting strategies and capital planning are also discussed and designed to bring the risk, vulnerability, and condition indices together into a thorough decision-making process. It is a must read for anyone involved in public infrastructure management, including professional civil and environmental engineers, utility managers, local government managers and officials, urban and regional planners, and civil and environmental engineering students.

Key Features:

Presents an overview of the components and maintenance needs of major public infrastructure systems
Outlines practical methods to gather data to assess the condition of each infrastructure system and tools to generate relevant data
Provides ways to evaluate risk and vulnerability in asset management and how to streamline the decision-making processes
Discusses the funding and prioritization of capital improvement projects within infrastructure systems
Expands on the use of work orders and repairs to improve information about each system
Includes critical case studies from around the United States where public infrastructure has failed, followed by the lessons learned
Features over 200 color figures and 75 tables to illustrate major points throughout the book, including the components of public water, sanitary sewer, and stormwater management systems
WAV contains instructor materials for adopting professors, including a proposed syllabus for the course, 15 PowerPoint lectures covering chapters 2 through 16, end-of-chapter homework questions and answers, project ideas for the instructor, GIS data sets for students to do their own condition assessments, and sample final and midterm exams