WATER HALLER – How do we follow Whistler?

Last year’s National Water & Wastewater Conference (NWWC) in Whistler was a great success – educationally, socially and financially. We were nervous leading into our first consolidated conference, but the combination of programs and the focus on utility leadership paid off. It’s a hard act to follow but we are up for the challenge and are confident we will produce another great event.

The full program is available now (and the registration) at www.nwwc2016.ca. I think you’ll be impressed by the strength of the program in each stream (water, wastewater, efficiency, security, climate change, biosolids and utility leadership). Our thanks to our volunteers on each technical committee that coordinated such solid programs.

Infrastructure Stream:  As infrastructure renewal is our most-pressing issue for our industry, we have dedicated the main plenary room to this topic for the first two days of the conference. We kick-off with a keynote presentation from John Woodhouse of the UK, one of the architects of ISO 55000 and PAS 55. We will hear international stories and Canadian lessons and discuss where we go next. This stream will also look at the tools we need to understand to manage our assets.

Pre-conference Workshops: We are excited to offer two incredible workshops on the Sunday before the main conference. One is on Enabling Resilience, while the other is on Integrating Climate Risk. Details for both are on the website.

Social: I have been getting a few requests to consider live-streaming the conference for remote access, but we are going to hold off on that for now. We are investigating how to do it affordably, but my concern is you miss the most-important aspect of a conference – the networking. There are a number of social events over the three nights and we are playing with a Film Festival theme to have a lot of fun. We are even running our own film festival and calling for all of you to send in your municipality’s or corporation’s videos that you may have made for educational/instructional purposes (like what not to flush or conservation tips etc).

Get registered soon.  Hotel rooms are limited and so is exhibition space.  

I expect to see you there!