Abstract

Denver Water Leveraging ArcGIS To Determine Water System Hidden Vulnerabilities
Track: Water, Wastewater, and Stormwater
Authors: Paul Hauffen, Jerry Edwards, Arnold Strasser

A water system's vulnerability is in direct proportion to the likelihood and consequence of failures relative to facility location and redundancies. This paper will present how Denver Water (DW) utilized software tools to better prepare for these hidden vulnerabilities that manifest as unplanned outages.

DW's Water System Criticality Study, through the use of the hydraulic model, and water system tracing functionality, provided results of over 61,000 potentially critical pipe segments in the DW system. These results include; demand shortfall, number of valves to be closed, number of fire hydrants placed out of service and pipe volume for dewatering for each respective pipe segment.

Esri's ArcGIS 10.0 was used as a collaborative tool to view, share, and communicate results of the Study to promote intra-departmental discussions of vulnerability, ranking, prioritization, response, customer impacts and preparedness. The groups in DW benefiting from this effort include Engineering, Planning, Operations, and Customer Service.