Passive assets

Many passive civil engineering assets usually have long service lives of between 70 to 100 years. Many of them were constructed during the 1930s and 1940s and it is only recently that failures of some of these assets are beginning to occur. In addition the failures of these assets (mainly community infrastructure assets) had been minor and were not of catastrophic nature. The impacts of these assets were mainly related to deterioration of services which had not been regarded as of any serious implications. Failures of some of these assets were seldom recorded, or even if they are available, have not been collected in a manner which allows for systematic and logical processes to be used in managerial decision making. There is, therefore, a general lack of information available on passive civil engineering assets. With the increasing awareness and expectations of the community / consumers on the levels of services databases on asset failures are only beginning to be systematically collected and analyzed. Many of these failure records were on pipeline assets and research had been carried out to model failure patterns and predict pipeline failures based on historical failure data, the asset information and the environment in which they occur.