Contingencies, Transient Events and Reliability in Managing Water Quality

Abstract

If the implementation of current regulations for environmental protection were to be entirely successful, and if urban wastewater were to be treated entirely at source, what would be the nature of water pollution control in the long run? Would an alternative style of regulation be needed and thus a different strategy of monitoring the environment? How might we acquire the knowledge base required to guide and inform the associated decision-making process? There are the sorts of questions that provide the motivation for this paper. In particular, it addresses problems of the reliability of contaminant removal and recovery from wastewater, the handling of contingencies, and the attenuation of transient pollution events associated with land-surface runoff.