Disaster Resilience of Drinking Water Infrastructure Systems to Multiple Hazards

Abstract

The increased dependability of modern societies on deteriorated water infrastructure (i.e., transmission and distribution systems) places special emphasis on its continuous functioning. Consequently, disaster resilience of these systems during and after hazards is vital for the response and recovery to the event. Water infrastructure system managers must understand the critical aspects of resiliency such as planning for hazardous conditions by anticipating the impacts and subsequently taking necessary measures to minimize consequences, and also prevent the disruption of other infrastructure systems (e.g., electrical infrastructure) by understanding and dealing with the critical interdependencies. A majority of these aspects are not always clear until the system has been exposed to the hazard, which is why we can learn so much from recent disasters. This paper will outline the key aspects of drinking water infrastructure system resiliency (e.g., system vulnerability, redundancy, management and response plans, etc.) and the parameters will be analyzed using historical hazardous events (e.g., Earthquakes and Hurricanes) to determine what the best practices were and should be moving forward. Recommendations for incorporating the best practices into rehabilitating existing systems and future designs will be discussed.

State of the research in community resilience: progress and challenges

“…The resilience of the water systems in terms of performance loss, recovery time, and recovery cost of the water network, while also incorporating a hydraulic analysis of the damaged network was investigated through stochastic simulation approach (Gay, 2013; Gay & Sinha, 2012). Several key aspects of drinking water system resilience have been identified as critical to the recovery process including the water distribution system redundancy, structural stability and integrity of water systems, and backup power of water facilities (Matthews, Piratla, & Matthews, 2014), which were used to identify appropriate improvements needed to make the water systems resilient for multiple hazards (Davis, 2014). Guidotti et al (2016) used a methodology based on a six-step probabilistic approach to evaluate the direct effects of seismic events on the functionality of a potable water distribution network, and the cascading effects of the damage of the electric power network on the potable water distribution network.…”

Resilience in Water Infrastructures: A Review of Challenges and Adoption Strategies

“…According to [64], obtaining meaningful and reliable data has always been a problem in quantifying resilience. In the same way that data from risk and vulnerability analyses assists decision-makers in recognizing problems, vulnerabilities, and allocating resources, the lack of quality information has a detrimental effect on society and other interdependencies [7,65].…”

Optimal Operation of Water Distribution Systems Using a Graph Theory–Based Configuration of District Metered Areas

“…In recent decades, many researchers have focused on various assessment criteria to improve the performance of WDS while using different optimisation approaches. Some examples are to maximise resilience (Farmani et al 2005, Nafi and Kleiner 2009, Matthews et al 2014, reliability (Farmani et al 2006, Kapelan et al 2005, minimise leakage (Araujo et al 2006, Ali 2015, Shafiee et al 2016, Vassiljev and Puust 2016, Giustolisi et al 2016, greenhouse gas emissions (Rahmani et al 2014), minimise both cost and energy (Rahmani et al 2015;Ostfeld et al 2013) and minimise both leakage and cost (Mahdavi et al 2010).…”