Anticipating water distribution service outages from increasing temperatures

Abstract

With projected temperature increases and extreme events due to climate change for many regions of the world, characterizing the impacts of these emerging hazards on water distribution systems is necessary to identify and prioritize adaptation strategies for ensuring reliability. To aid decision-making, new insights are needed into how water distribution system reliability to climate-driven heat will change, and the proactive maintenance strategies available to combat failures. To this end, we present the model Perses, a framework that joins a water distribution network hydraulic solver with reliability models of physical assets or components to estimate temperature increase-driven failures and resulting service outages in the long term. A case study is developed using Phoenix, Arizona, a city with extreme temperatures and a rapidly expanding infrastructure. By end-of-century under hotter futures there are projected to be 1-5% more pump failures in Phoenix, 2-5% more PVC pipe failures, and 3-7% more iron pipe failures (RCP 4.5-8.5) than a baseline historical temperature profile. Service outages, which constitute inadequate pressure for domestic and commercial use are projected to increase by 16-26% above the baseline under maximum temperature conditions. The exceedance of baseline failures, when compounded across a large metro region, reveals potential challenges for budgeting, management, and maintenance. An exploration of the mitigation potential of adaptation strategies shows that expedited repair times are capable of offsetting the additional outages from climate change, but will come with a cost.

Drinking Water Utility-Level Understanding of Climate Change Effects to System Reliability

“…Eighteen percent (11 out of 60) of participants said they did not believe climate change would influence their water utility system’s overall reliability, and 38% (23 out of 60) of participants said they did not believe climate change would affect their system’s infrastructure. These findings are notable given the availability of literature describing effects of climate change on water utilities and tools designed for these systems to assess their climate risk, 3 , 4 , 19 − 24 as well as the extensive relationships participants drew between climate hazards and system reliability (shown in Figure 4 ). Previous work found French water managers perceive climate change at different temporal and spatial scales than they view their water management work; 67 participants interviewed in this study might have similar disconnects between familiar confidence in their systems’ reliability and the novel risks climate change presents.…”

“…While these potential effects of climate change on water utility system reliability have been well documented, − it is unclear whether utility managers are aware of the scope of the climate risk facing their systems. Although guidance and tools for climate resilience exist, ,,− literature on how utilities consider climate risk is limited to case studies.…”

The Impact of Climate Change on the Failure of Water Supply Infrastructure: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Current State of Knowledge

“…These analyses took into account pipe materials, pipe diameters, weather factors (temperature, precipitation, snow cover, wind and humidity) and soil settlement. In recent years, research is continued to identify factors related to the impact of climate that influences the failure of water supply networks such as temperature fluctuations or sea level rises [7,12,[36][37][38][39].…”

“…The results of the analysis also indicate gaps in ongoing research, which may indicate research directions for other researchers. So far, most attention has been focused on issues related to the identification of factors related to the impact of climate on the failure rate of water distribution systems [7,12,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]49,50]. A popular research topic was also the prediction of water supply network failures, taking into account the impact of climatic factors [40][41][42][43][44][45][46].…”

“…Water treatment plants must deal with new contaminants that cannot always be removed using existing infrastructure. Finally, the impact of climate change is also observed in the water distribution subsystem, where the seasonality of the impact of weather factors is observed, or the intensification of the impact of extreme weather phenomena that cause interruptions in the water supply due to failures of pipelines or other water supply infrastructure [7,11,12]. Climate change also affects water-use patterns, which increase with increasing temperatures [13].…”