Distributed urban water system enhances system resilience to disruptive incidents

Abstract:

Water and wastewater systems are critical infrastructure systems. The resilience of the water and wastewater infrastructure is intertwined with other critical infrastructures, and is vital to economic growth, public health, governance, and national security. Critical infrastructure should be resilient to disruptive incidents, including natural disasters, system failures, and terrorist attacks. In this study, we quantified resilience metrics of an existing centralized water supply system and a hypothetical distributed water supply system with wastewater reclamation, and performed comparative analysis of system resilience under typical disruptive incidents, such as pipe leakage, pump station failures, and water contamination. The analysis enabled us to identify interventions that would mitigate disruptions. We found that the distributed water system enables greater reliability and resilience capability than the centralized system by limiting the severity, extent, and duration of substandard performance. The absorptive capacity of disruptions of both systems exhibit geographical disparities. Specifically, areas with high water pressure are less susceptible to a variety of systemic or localized disruptions in both centralized and distributed systems. Findings from this study underscore the importance of re-evaluating our century-old centralized urban water system and consider alternative, distributed configurations of water treatment and production that render higher water and energy efficiency, system reliability, and resilience.