**3.3 Example 3: infrastructure**

Public water and sewer utility systems are created to develop safe, reliable, and financially self-supporting potable water and sanitary sewage systems, which will meet the water and sewerage needs of the areas served by the utility, to ensure that existing and future utility facilities are constructed, operated, and managed with high reliability and are compatible with the area's future growth. To gain efficiencies in

#### **Figure 4.**

*Dose–response function for* C. Parvum*—All six datasets compared with beta-Poisson. The beta-Poisson is the most conservative of the sets. Once the last three datasets (TAMU, UC, and More) are added; all provide the same graph (reproduced from Bloetscher, et al. 2020).*

operation, these new facilities must be developed in accordance with the latest technical and professional standards to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the citizens served now or in the future.

Public infrastructure has been poorly rated by the American Society of Civil Engineers [60–65], and most public officials acknowledge the deterioration of the infrastructure we rely on daily. Part of the challenge is that many jurisdictions have limited information about their systems, and little data to use to justify spending of specific project. Hence the infrastructure tends to deteriorate further each year as local officials opt to limit budgets in the absence of good needs data. As a result, state and local governments currently spend about 1.8% of its GNP on infrastructure, as compared with 3.1% in 1970 [66]. Twice as much was spent 40 years ago, and a large portion of today's costs are for growth as opposed to repair and replacement. Asset management is supposed to help this meet this challenge.

An asset management program consists of determining the selected area of study, type of system, and the quality of data used for evaluation. The question is how to collect data that might be useful to a utility that does not involve a lot of destructive testing on buried infrastructure that is costly and inconvenient. When creating an asset management plan, missing data are perceived to be a huge problem, especially when the event data (breaks in pipe as an example) are not tracked. The lack of tracking makes it difficult to determine which factors are the critical ones. Many utilities lack the resources for examining buried infrastructure, so other methods of data collection are needed. The concept in Bloetscher et al. [67] was to develop a
