Best Practice Protocols For Response And Recovery Operations In Contaminated Water Systems

The objective of this project is to develop an analysis and decision support tool (either a computer model or guidance document) that will provide guidance to water sector owners and operators for the decontamination of water systems after a significant chemical or biological agent contamination.  The desired outcome of this project is guidance that will assist local, state, and regional Water Sector utility owners and operators during their initial response to, and subsequent decision making regarding, flushing and restoring contaminated water systems.  This project will integrate a mult‐scale approach, enabling local and regional resiliency data be extrapolated to assess potential national impact and exposure.  Further, a multi‐faceted approach will be taken to ensure that the resulting system will incorporate component tools that will be useful for as broad a range of system complexities and network knowledge levels as possible.  At the local level, public water distribution system, operators and decision makers need some way to determine what part of their system will be adversely affected, the extent of the impact, and the decontamination procedures that would need to be executed. A graphical decision support system for local economic analysis of a particular distribution system will be developed to meet this need.  Linkages to hydraulic models will be developed to provide mechanistic approach to assessing decontamination needs resulting from specific network disruption scenarios.  A rules‐based decision support system will be developed to provide an expert system approach for users with limited knowledge and/or data availability regarding the system hydraulics and decontamination approaches.  Scale‐relevant Fact sheets and guidance documents will summarize the knowledge‐base incorporated in the decision support system components.  Training content will be developed and deployed through a series of workshop to refine the final products and to educate as many utilities as possible.