The study by Dr. Behrooz Balaei and colleagues have investigated the technical characteristics of water supply that affect its resilience against disasters.
Failure to meet the required functionality will not only affect residents and critical users but also services like health, education, fire services, and other organizations needed for a society to function.
The researchers focus on identifying the technical factors such as vulnerability, pipe redundancy, and criticality to measure water system robustness – and subsequently resilience.
These factors were gathered through a comprehensive review of the literature and verified by water engineers and resilience experts through a series of interviews.
The Water Supply Comprehensive Aggregated Resilience Measure (CARE) model is used to identify factors affecting water supply resilience and ultimately, measuring water supply robustness.
Vulnerability and criticality have a negative impact on the water system’s resilience, while redundancy has a positive impact. In other words, higher the vulnerability or criticality of a water supply system asset is, lower the network’s resilience will be.
These factors were then used in a hypothetical earthquake scenario in Pukerua Bay (Wellington, New Zealand) to measure the robustness of its water system.
The result shows that water networks at Pukerua Bay lack robustness in three general areas. The study also recommends measures to be applied to increase Pukerua Bay water supply robustness.
There are many applications of the model produced in the study.
Local authorities can use it to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the system to optimise investments.
The model also can be applied to other disasters such as climate hazards that could impact the water system’s vulnerability.
Read the entire study by CLICKING the link below:
Citation:
Balaei, B., Wilkinson, S., Potangaroa, R., & McFarlane, P. (2020, May). Investigating the technical dimension of water supply resilience to disasters. Sustainable Cities and Society. Volume 56. 102077. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2210670720300640
Leave a Reply