Landslide Pipe Criticality Analysis Linking Hazard and Social Vulnerability Data
Citation:
Hogge, J., K. Klise, D. Hart, AND Terranna Haxton. Landslide Pipe Criticality Analysis Linking Hazard and Social Vulnerability Data. 2024 World Environmental & Water Resources Congress, Milwaukee, WI, May 19 - 22, 2024.
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 presentation is a case-study application of WNTR to a Pennsylvania drinking water system. WNTR was used to analyze the resilience of the system to landslides and incorporated the social vulnerability index. 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:
Resilience analysis of critical infrastructure is inherently complex and requires the integration of diverse geospatial data and disparate models in a cohesive analysis to produce meaningful decision support. Recent updates to the Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) allow incorporation of up-to-date geospatial data describing the water system, hazards, and surrounding community into a resilience analysis. In this presentation, we will show a resilience analysis of the drinking water system in a U.S. city which integrates the water distribution network model, landslide susceptibility, social vulnerability, and emergency service locations. Results demonstrate that pipes can be prioritized for mitigation based on water shortage and vulnerable populations that are affected. The methods can be adopted for general use and are available as part of the WNTR software.