Managing Disasters Using Pressure Dependent Demand Analysis – Case Study of Shirpur Town

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Water is the most essential component for sustaining lives of humans and other living creatures. Supplying potable water with adequate residual pressure is a fundamental responsibility of city administration, which they do during normal conditions. But sometimes, abnormal conditions are formed resulting pressure deficient conditions during the daily operations of water distribution networks. These are caused due to common occurrences such as pump failure, pipe bursts, and isolation of major pipes from the system for planned maintenance work and excessive firefighting demands. Total water stop conditions may arise, when the major source supplying water to the city fails in natural disaster such as floods, Tsunami, earthquake or manmade disaster such as terrorist attack. Unlike the pipe failure, longer time is required for restoring water in case of source failure condition. In such situations, the quantity of water is generally decreased and the water distribution systems (WDS) may not be able to satisfy all consumers’ demands. In this context, the assumption that all demands are fully satisfied regardless of the pressure in the system becomes unreasonable. A realistic behavior of the network performance can only be attained by considering demands to be pressure dependent. This paper aims to describe how pressure dependent demand analysis is useful for the simulation of disaster scenario due to source failure of the Shirpur town. The simulation of failure scenario is carried out using WaterGEMs software. The paper also aims to prepare the action plans for the recovery of water supply in such crisis conditions.