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Resilience analysis and emergency response evaluation for drinking water systems
Citation:
Chu-Ketterer, J., W. Platten, S. Bolenbaugh, AND Terranna Haxton. Resilience analysis and emergency response evaluation for drinking water systems. Journal AWWA. American Water Works Association, Denver, CO, 115(5):32-42, (2023). https://doi.org/10.1002/awwa.2107
Impact/Purpose:
Drinking water systems face multiple challenges, including aging infrastructure, water quality concerns, uncertainty in supply and demand, naturaldisasters, environmental emergencies, and terrorist attacks. All of these have the potential to disrupt a large portion of a water system causing damage toinfrastructure and outages to customers. Increasing resilience to these types of hazards is essential to improving water security. The Water Network Toolfor Resilience (WNTR) is a Python package allowing for end-to-end evaluation of drinking water infrastructure resilience to disasters. The softwareimproves upon EPANET's capabilities by fully integrating hydraulic and water quality simulation, damage estimates and response actions, and resiliencemetrics into a single platform. This tool is important for drinking water systems around the world who want to better understand how their water systemscan withstand natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and power outages. This paper is a case-study application of WNTR to a drinking water utility inPennsylvania. WNTR was used to analyze the resilience of the system to pipe breaks in large diameter water mains, pump and tank outages,and the loss of the source water. In addition, the analysis incorporated social, economic, and environmental factors to identify high priority areas in the water distribution system that could improve equitable resilience. 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 Pennsylvania to pipe damage, pump and tank outages, and loss of source water. Emergency response actions based upon standard operating procedures were also evaluated. In addition, this analysis incorporated social, economic, and environmental factors to identify high priority areas in the water distribution that could improve equitable resilience. This case study highlights only a subset of the analysis capabilities of WNTR. The analysis in this paper can be used by other water utilities to understand vulnerabilities to similar disaster scenarios.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Resilience analysis and emergency response evaluation for drinking water systems