Lesson 1: Defining the Water and Emergency Services Sectors

Lesson Overview

In this lesson, you will learn about key components of the water and emergency services sectors. Considered lifeline sectors, both water and emergency services are made up of a network that works together to ensure communities are safe, resilient, with access to clean drinking water.

Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to:

Identify and define key actors in the water and emergency services sectors.
Understand the landscape for both drinking- and wastewater utilities.

Lifeline Sectors

The Department of Homeland Security defines the water sector and the emergency services sector as lifeline sectors. As lifeline sectors, they ensure the resilience, safety and rapid recovery of their communities. The emergency services sector is a network of services, including EMAs, that provide functions such as law enforcement, emergency management, fire and hazardous materials services. The water sector includes drinking water and wastewater utilities that provide safe, potable water for drinking and treatment of water from sewer systems to ensure lakes, rivers and streams are not contaminated.

The water sector, which includes drinking water and wastewater utilities, relies upon emergency services to:

Help protect utilities from incidents that could cause service disruptions
Respond when incidents do occur
Aid in recovery following incidents

Increasing coordination between the water and emergency services sectors is vital to mitigating the impact of future disasters on drinking water and wastewater utilities, EMAs and the communities they serve.

Drinking Water Treatment

Public water systems, or drinking water utilities, are responsible for treating and delivering millions of gallons of clean, safe drinking water to customers every day. This process begins with surface water and/or ground water traveling through pipes or canals to a drinking water treatment facility, where it is typically stored prior to entering a variety of physical, biological and chemical treatment trains. Finished, treated water is disinfected and then distributed through a network of hundreds or thousands of miles of pipes, tanks, pumps and valves to customers.

Click on each element of the Community Drinking Water System to learn more.

Drinking Water Utility Landscape

A drinking water utility, or Public Water System (PWS), is a system that serves water to at least 15 service connections or serves an average of at least 25 people for at least two months out of a year.
In the United States, there are over 148,000 PWSs serving 3,142 counties.
PWSs are classified according to the number of people they serve, the source of their water, and whether they serve customers year-round or on an occasional basis.

Mouseover to reveal each PWS definition.

Community Water System Distribution

Eighty-three percent of community water systems serve less than 50,000. Despite their large number, these smaller sized systems serve only 8 percent of the population. In comparison, the remaining 17 percent of larger water systems serve over 250 million people. Community water systems may use ground water (aquifers), surface water (e.g., rivers, lakes, reservoirs, springs) or a combination of the two for their water source. The majority of community water systems serving fewer than 10,000 people use ground water as their source.

However, most Americans are served by a community water system that serves greater than 100,000 people and uses surface water as its source water. A variety of factors such as local environmental conditions, activities or land use near the water source, and both man-made and natural hazards have a direct impact on the quality of source water. Protecting drinking water sources is key to sustaining safe drinking water. Water utility staff should coordinate their protection planning efforts with local and state partners, such as EMAs, public health, law enforcement, and hazmat response.

Wastewater Utility Landscape

Wastewater is largely treated by publicly owned treatment works (POTWs). A smaller number of private facilities, such as industrial plants, also treat wastewater. A POTW is a device or system used to treat, recycle, or reclaim municipal wastewater or industrial liquid waste that is owned by a state, municipality, special sewer district or other publicly owned and financed entity. There are over 16,000 POTWs in the U.S. and like drinking water, there are fewer large wastewater utilities (21%) than smaller utilities (79%).

Ten percent of the population receives sanitation services from small wastewater utilities, or utilities that treat less than one million gallons per day (MGD).
Utilities that treat more than one MGD are considered medium (1-10 MGD) and large utilities (10 or more MGD) provide wastewater treatment to the other 90 percent of the population served.

Mouseover to reveal each definition.

Wastewater Treatment

Like drinking water systems, disruption of wastewater treatment utilities can also lead to severe public health and environmental impacts.

Wastewater enters the sewer system from homes, businesses, schools and other buildings, and travels through miles of pipes to a treatment facility.

The wastewater is then processed through multiple treatment phases—physical, biological and chemical—before being discharged, often into a nearby river, stream or other waterbody.

Click on the drinking water treatment and wastewater treatment plant in the image below to learn more.

Emergency Services Sector Overview

Like the water sector, the emergency services sector focuses on protecting the public and its interdependent sectors. The sector is organized at the local, tribal, state and federal levels of government. This includes city police departments, county sheriff’s offices, police and fire departments, town public works departments and EMAs. The emergency services sector also includes private sector resources such as industrial fire departments, private security organizations and private emergency medical services (EMS) providers. Understanding the emergency services sector is important, as emergency services provide the first line of defense for nearly all critical infrastructure sectors and the American public. Free resources, trainings, a sector specific plan and more are available for government and private sector partners from the Department of Homeland Security.

Lesson Summary

In this lesson you learned about key components of the water and emergency services sectors. Considered lifeline sectors, both water and emergency services are made up of a network that works together to ensure communities are safe and resilient with access to clean drinking water. You should now be able to:

Identify and define key actors in the water and emergency services sectors.
Understand the landscape for both drinking water and wastewater utilities.