Professor Kevin Lansey presents:

Water supply and distribution resilience in practice

Abstract: The growing broadly accepted conceptual model for resilience across infrastructures is taken from earthquake engineering and describes the 4R’s: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity. Metrics and measures for each R and overall resilience terms can provide direction in design and operational decision-making but depend on the application. However, water systems have concerns at multiple and spatial and temporal time scales. Long term availability and robustness is the primary emphasis in a community’s water resource planning while infrastructure development may focus on redundancy to avoid failure. Finally, at short time scales, related to water distribution, failures are expected and minimizing their occurrence and impact through redundancy and responses become central to decision making. Thus, a single tool may not be acceptable for all scales. Here, conceptual resilience definitions are summarized and demonstrated through applications to water supply, large scale water infrastructure and water distribution operations.