Water in Paradise: Research on Water Network and Community Vulnerabilities

摘要

WILDFIRES HAVE INCREASED IN INTENSITY andfrequency over the last decade. In addition, the wildlandurban interface (WUI) land use is the fastest growingland use in the US, with almost one-third of the USpopulation living in a WUI. As such, recent wildfires havecaused catastrophic damage to civil infrastructure, andengineers and fire scientists must develop solutions forWUI communities to be resilient. In particular, recent firesin California have caused significant damage to waterdistribution systems. Both the 2017 Tubbs Fire and the2018 Camp Fire (see Figure 1) caused damage to thewater distribution systems in Santa Rosa and Paradise,respectively, which resulted in contaminated waterwithin the system. The fires heated the service pipelinematerials thereby causing contaminates - benzene andother volatile organic compounds (VOCs) - to migratefrom the pipe materials into the water and negativepressure due to homes burning-caused backflow of sootand ash into the water distribution system. However,there are no current solutions to this problem, and at thetime of this article, many communities in California arebeing evacuated due to wildfires.