by Justin Felles 

IRWINDALE, Calif.—Southern California sits in the middle of earthquake territory and eventually the day will come when a damaging quake hits, potentially crippling vital lifelines in the region for days, weeks — even months.

You can never be too prepared. 

As part of its ongoing emergency preparedness planning, Southern California Edison recently hosted a daylong multi-agency drill to simulate a major 7.8 earthquake.  

Resilience. It’s not a term commonly associated with real estate, however, growing environmental stresses and their threat to the built environment are bringing it to the forefront of long-term real estate investment strategies.

Resilience is defined as the ability to avoid, or bounce back quickly from, an adverse event.

In the realm of real estate, it pertains to buildings being able to sustain capital values and an uninterrupted flow of operating income after a natural disaster or catastrophic event.

There are an estimated 240,000 water main breaks every year in the United States, and those ruptures waste between 14 percent and 18 percent of the nation’s drinking water. Aging infrastructure is primarily to blame, as an estimated 40 percent of U.S. water and  wastewater pipes are beyond their life expectancy, notes a recent article in WaterWorld.

In an era when climate change, organizational capacity constraints, funding challenges and limited public support continue to test the resilience of a community's stormwater system, images of flooded neighborhoods and arterial streets turned into rivers highlight the urgency for a strategic vision and alternative approaches to stormwater management service delivery. The critical question is whether leaders and managers are exploring holistic alternative approaches that address program planning, organizational capacity, service delivery mechanisms and financing.