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Resilience analysis of potable water service after power outages in the U.S. Virgin Islands
Citation:
Klise, K., R. Moglen, J. Hogge, D. Eisenberg, AND Terranna Haxton. Resilience analysis of potable water service after power outages in the U.S. Virgin Islands. JOURNAL OF WATER RESOURCES PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT. American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Reston, VA, 148(12):05022010, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0001607
Impact/Purpose:
Drinking water systems face multiple challenges, including aging infrastructure, water quality concerns, uncertainty in supply and demand, natural disasters, environmental emergencies, and terrorist attacks. All of these have the potential to disrupt a large portion of a water system causing damage to infrastructure and outages to customers. Increasing resilience to these types of hazards is essential to improving water security. The Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) is a Python package allowing for end-to-end evaluation of drinking water infrastructure resilience to disasters. The software improves upon EPANET's capabilities by fully integrating hydraulic and water quality simulation, damage estimates and response actions, and resilience metrics into a single platform. This tool is important for drinking water systems around the world who want to better understand how their water systems can withstand natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and power outages. This paper is a case-study application of WNTR to the U.S. Virgin Islands drinking water systems. WNTR was used to analyze the resilience of the system to long term power outages, similar to those caused by hurricanes. This paper provides examples of how WNTR can be used by researchers, consultants, and drinking water utilities to gain valuable information about distribution systems and their resilience to a range of disasters or disruptions.
Description:
The two Category-5 hurricanes that impacted the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2017 exposed critical infrastructure vulnerabilities that needs to be addressed. While the water utility has first-hand knowledge about how the hurricanes impacted their systems, the use of modeling and simulation tools helps expose additional insight that can aid investment planning and preparedness. This paper provides a case study on resilience analysis for the islands potable water systems subject to long term power outages. Power outage scenarios help quantify differences in water delivery, water quality, and water quantity during and after the disruption. The analysis helps illustrate important differences in system operations and recovery time across the islands. Results from this case study can be used to better understand how the system may behave during a future disruption and provide justification for investment. The analysis framework can also be used by other utilities to explore vulnerability to long term power outages.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Resilience analysis of potable water service after power outages in the U.S. Virgin Islands
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