Looking beyond individual failures: A system-wide assessment of water infrastructure resilience to extreme events

Water infrastructure systems throughout the United States face compounding challenges due to aging infrastructure and increasingly extreme and more frequent weather events. Identifying vulnerabilities and assessing systems’ ability to withstand and recover from such events is a critical component of water infrastructure planning and management. Pipe failures and system structure can substantially impact water infrastructure resilience, but these two factors are often assessed separately. Here, we present a holistic assessment of system performance that considers pipe failures, active water storage, and system structure utilizing data collected during normal and emergency operating conditions. The four-step framework evaluates pipe failures spatially and temporally to assess overall system performance, as measured by active storage, and identifies targeted areas for improvements. Employing control charts, resilience curves, and spatial clustering analysis, our results simultaneously reveal an agreement between trends in pipe failures during normal and emergency operating conditions as well as unexpected discrepancies between pipe failures and system performance due to the water system structure. Our results offer insights to utilities seeking to assess system vulnerabilities to increase water infrastructure resilience to extreme events.