Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) Saltwater Intrusion Tutorial
Citation:
Bonney, K., K. Klise, T. Haxton, C. Karrenberg, D. Hart, AND J. Hogge. Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) Saltwater Intrusion Tutorial. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2025.
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 WNTR tutorial includes how to obtain storm surge data from CREAT, how to overlay this geospatial data and associate it with water distribution system components, how to simulate the impacts of a hurricane storm surge by assuming saltwater intrusions, and how to simulate a flushing response action by the utility to reduce the impact. The tutorial demonstrates how to use geospatial data in WNTR analysis, which can be replicated for other disaster scenarios. WNTR 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:
Drinking water utilities need to be resilient to all types of disasters. The Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) will be updated to use data projection maps available in Office of Water's Climate Resilience Evaluation and Awareness Tool (CREAT). The inclusion of these maps will provide utilities an opportunity for utilities to do a deeper dive on the potential impacts of disasters on their systems. The storm surge data projection map from CREAT was used to develop a WNTR tutorial. This tutorial details the steps to obtain the storm surge data and then overlay it over the drinking water distribution system model to determine the potential impacts of a hurricane. For this tutorial, the storm surge was simulated as saltwater intrusions into the system at multiple locations. The tutorial also provides an example of a response action that a utility might take to remove the saltwater from the system by flushing at multiple locations. The tutorial is an example of using disaster geospatial data to analyze the potential impacts to the system as well as evaluating effective response actions.
URLs/Downloads:
SALT_WATER_INTRUSION_TUTORIAL 062325.HTMLSALT_WATER_INTRUSION_TUTORIAL 062325.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 1135.374 KB, about PDF)
WNTR SALTWATER TUTORIAL 062325.ZIP
https://github.com/USEPA/WNTR
