You are here:
Water Infrastructure Resilience Evaluation Using WNTR
Citation:
Haxton, Terranna, M. Nagarkar, AND K. Klise. Water Infrastructure Resilience Evaluation Using WNTR. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/S-23/240, 2023.
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 technical summary report provides an overview of WNTR along with case-study applications to the U.S. Virgin Islands drinking water systems, the Poughkeepsie, New York water system, and a Pennsylvania water system. WNTR was used to analyze the resilience of these systems to a variety of disaster scenarios, including long term power outages, earthquakes, and loss of source water and evaluated a few emergency response actions, such as water conservation. This summary report 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:
Drinking water utilities face multiple challenges, including aging infrastructure, water quality concerns, pipe breaks, natural disasters, environmental emergencies, and terrorist attacks. All of these have the potential to disrupt service to customers and damage critical infrastructure. Increasing resilience to these types of hazards is essential. Simulation and analysis tools can help water utilities predict how their system will respond to expected, and unexpected, incidents and help inform decisions to make water distribution systems more resilient. The United States Environmental Protection Agency, in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, developed the Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR), an open-source Python package, to help water utilities investigate the resilience of their distribution systems to a wide range of hazardous scenarios and evaluate emergency response actions and long-term resilience enhancing strategies. The software estimates potential damages from disaster scenarios; predicts how damage to infrastructure would occur over time; evaluates preparedness strategies; prioritizes response actions; and identifies worse case scenarios and efficient repair strategies. This technical summary report provides an overview of WNTR along with case study applications.