EPA's Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR)
Citation:
Haxton, T. EPA's Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR). Presented at 20th Annual EPA Drinking Water Workshop: Small System Challenges and Solutions, Covington, KY, September 12 - 14, 2023.
Impact/Purpose:
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 presentation provides an overview of WNTR along with results from a few case-study applications, including the Poughkeepsie, New York drinking water system, the U.S. Virgin Islands drinking water systems, and a Pennsylvania drinking water system. This presentation 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, uncertainty in supply and demand, 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 to improving water security. 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 over time. 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 integrate critical aspects of resilience modeling for water distribution networks into a single software framework. WNTR can help water utilities investigate the resilience of their water 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, efficient repair strategies, and best practices for maintenance and operations. This presentation will provide an overview of WNTR along with a few case study applications.