Citation:

Chu-Ketterer, Lucinda-Joi, R. Murray, P. Hassett, J. Kogan, K. Klise, AND Terranna Haxton. Performance and Resilience Analysis of a New York Drinking Water System to Localized and System-Wide Emergencies. JOURNAL OF WATER RESOURCES PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT. American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Reston, VA, 149(1):05022015, (2023). https://doi.org/10.1061/JWRMD5.WRENG-5631

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 a drinking water utility in New York. WNTR was used to analyze the resilience of the system to increased demands due to firefighting, pipe breaks in large diameter water mains, and the loss of the source water. 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:

Drinking water utilities are vulnerable to both human-caused and natural disasters that can impact the system infrastructure and the delivery of potable water to consumers. Resilience analysis can help utilities identify high-risk areas in their system and understand how to better serve consumers during disasters. The Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) was used to investigate the resilience of a drinking water system in the state of New York to increased demands due to firefighting, pipe, and segment damage, and loss of source water. This case study highlights only a subset of the analysis capabilities of WNTR. Population impact results revealed that the highest impact firefighting node affected 1,273 consumers, and the highest impact pipe and segment affected all 80,122 consumers. Water service availability (WSA) and pressure results revealed the time taken to recover the system after loss of source water impacted the system’s ability to return to normal operations. When access to source water was recovered within 27 hours, WSA returned to normal after 33 hours and pressure stabilized after 77 hours. When access to source water was recovered within 38 hours, WSA returned to normal after 66 hours and pressure stabilized after 144 hours. Additionally, greater conservation efforts maintained WSA and pressure for 20 hours more hours compared to when zero conservation efforts were implemented. The analysis in this paper can be used by other water utilities to understand vulnerabilities to similar disaster scenarios.

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