Improving reliability of urban water systems under southwest climate change stressors

A new design paradigm is needed for infrastructure designers to quantitatively anticipate how reliability may be affected by increases in failures of components and processes from climate change stressors, and where efforts should be focused to prevent and prepare for failures. Two systems reliability modeling tools are presented using urban water infrastructure case study examples of their use. An example fault tree analysis is presented for Southwestern water provision utilities to estimate how failures can lead to supply shortages or quality non-compliance. Additionally, comparative reliability block diagrams are used to show that resilient design strategies could quantitatively improve storm water systems reliability under extreme precipitation scenarios. Ultimately, utilities will need to change their design and operational guidelines to ensure that reliability is maintained into the future, and these modeling techniques promise to be tools that can help them in the process.