Understanding Changes in Water Consumption during a Water Supply Interruption using Advanced Metering Infrastructure Data
Abstract
Water main breaks result in hazardous effects including property damage, road flooding, loss of system pressure, and introduction of pathogens to a pipe network. Utilities need an understanding of the level of compliance with "do not use" orders during these events to enable efficient consequence mitigation. This research uses Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), or smart water meters, which provide data about hourly water consumption to explore household response during a water supply interruption. In November 2018, a water line leaving the Orange County Water and Sewer Authority (OWASA) water treatment plant in North Carolina broke, leading to loss of pressure, declining storage levels in water tanks, and loss of service for 80,000 customers. Residents in Orange County were asked to limit water use to essential purposes, including drinking and hygiene for one day, and to boil water over the course of three days. In this research, we explore the number of households that complied with requests to reduce use, the volume of water that was saved by household conservation, and household characteristics that contributed to compliance decisions. We use an AMI dataset for Orange County, North Carolina, which reports hourly consumption at 18,000 meters across multiple sectors. Statistical approaches are applied for the AMI dataset to quantify the number of users that reduced consumption following the pipe break. Machine learning techniques are used to model the expected hourly water use at each meter and explore the volume of water savings and changes to expected diurnal water use patterns. Finally, regression models are developed to explore how climate parameters, household characteristics, and utility communications affect decisions to reduce consumption.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMH148...02B
- Keywords:
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- 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1878 Water/energy interactions;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 6344 System operation and management;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES