Risk, Resilience, and Emergency Planning

The 2018 America’s Water Infrastructure Act required water systems to complete a Risk and Resilience Assessment (RRA) and Emergency Response Plan (ERP). These plans were due to the EPA between March, 2020 and December, 2021 (deadline varied depending on the size of the water system). EPA periodically inspects water systems to ensure they are maintaining satisfactory water treatment and compliance with regulatory requirements, and during recent inspections, some systems had issues with the RRAs or ERPs.

The Division of Water is reminding water systems of the requirement to complete and maintain a RRA and ERP. These documents should be available on-site in case of emergency – this means it is a good idea to have them available in a format that every operator can access easily, such as printed in a file or saved into a common network folder. The RRP and ERP are essential to a safe, smooth, and timely response to emergency situations – which unfortunately have impacted many of Kentucky’s water systems in recent years – so these documents should be familiar and easily accessible to everyone at the water plant who may be involved in emergency response. This may mean providing training to operators and administrators so they understand what these documents are, where to find them, and how and when to use them.

EPA maintains a web page with resources water systems can use to maintain the RRA and ERP documents. Deadlines to submit updated documents are listed below.