ASCE has honored Sunil Sinha, Ph.D., M.ASCE, with the 2025 Le Val Lund Award for Practicing Lifeline Risk Reduction for his leadership and achievements on risk reduction in pipelines and water infrastructure to improve water lifeline resilience.
Sinha has demonstrated an amazing power to engage a wide diversity of students, academics, engineers, scientists, and other professionals in government agencies, NGOs, and water utilities, as well as the private sector, in his compelling vision and enabling efforts for smarter and more resilient water management.
He and the SWIM Center at Virginia Tech, of which he is director, have offered both a vision and pathways for implementing integration of water science, management and policy, and efforts to connect the “built” and the “natural” water infrastructure and environments – to efficiently and smartly monitor, model, and manage them as an integrated system.
In addition, Sinha has been aware of water distribution, quality, and environmental problems issues and problems for a long time and taken the time to alert the public about the problems of decaying water infrastructure. His 2008 PBS documentary and community toolkit Liquid Assets: The Story of Our Water Infrastructure garnered much public attention, including from members of the U.S. Congress. This attention led to Congressional funding (through the Bureau of Reclamation) for Sinha’s PipeID project – a database project of water delivery infrastructure obtaining required data and information from 500 different water utilities and 100 federal facilities across the U.S. in which Sinha’s unique leadership abilities were essential for success.
Sinha’s vision for integrated water science, policy, and management “Smart One Water” (SOW) has also led USGS’ Ken Bagstad (USGS Research Economist) to introduce “water accounting” into SOW, and additional plans for implementation of SOW through pilots focused on the Delaware River Basin and the Colorado River Basin have been developed.
The Le Val Lund Award for Practicing Lifeline Risk Reduction recognizes an individual for contributions to the practice of reducing risks to lifeline systems and preparing communities for natural and man-made hazards.
