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Case Study Applications of Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR)
Citation:
Haxton, T., R. Murray, AND K. Klise. Case Study Applications of Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR). 2021 World Environmental & Water Resources Congress, Virtual, N/A, June 01 - 07, 2021.
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 presentation introduces the WNTR software and its capabilities. In addition, a series of case studies and examples will be presented. 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:
Water distribution systems are among the most critical civil infrastructure and must be prepared to withstand or quickly recover from any disruptive incident. With increasing threats to drinking water systems, including natural disasters, water shortages, power outages, bioterrorism, and other emergencies, utilities need to evaluate and strengthen their overall resilience. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Sandia National Laboratories have developed the Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) to quantify resilience of water distribution systems. This presentation includes results from real water utility case studies. The case studies use WNTR to evaluate the resilience of drinking water distribution systems to different disaster scenarios. The case studies are designed to demonstrate how WNTR can help with estimating the potential damages (e.g., number of broken pipes, number of people without water), evaluating different preparedness strategies (e.g., installing back-up generators), prioritizing response actions (e.g., which broken pipes to fix first, where to implement water conservation efforts), and identifying worse case scenarios. In addition to presenting results from each case study, the presentation will include lessons learned and future research needs to continue improving resilience analysis for water utilities.