Assessing the resilience of Region 2 drinking water systems to natural disasters - EPA's Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR)
Citation:
Haxton, T. Assessing the resilience of Region 2 drinking water systems to natural disasters - EPA's Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR). Congress on the State of the Environment - Workshop in Preamble of the 6th Congress, NA - virtual, PR, August 25, 2022.
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.
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Sandia National Laboratories have developed the Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) to quantify resilience of drinking water distribution systems. WNTR is a Python package designed to simulate disaster scenarios and analyze impacts on water distribution networks. WNTR can help water utilities to explore the capacity of their systems to handle disasters and guide the planning necessary to make systems more resilient over time. WNTR has an application programming interface (API) that is flexible and allows for changes to the network structure and operations, along with simulation of disruptive incidents and recovery actions. WNTR can be installed through the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) GitHub organization at https://github.com/USEPA/WNTR. This presentation provides an overview of WNTR along with case study applications.