Emergency water supply planning for the national capital region

Abstract

This article summarizes the methods used to develop and document operational plans to address contingency conditions for large-scale failure of the public water supply system in an emergency for an urban/suburban metropolitan region. Operational plans were developed to address the following four critical water usage needs: 1) drinking water, 2) firefighting, 3) hospital facilities, and 4) general sanitation. The objective of the project was to identify readily implementable operational procedures that could be documented and distributed in advance to appropriate personnel and not requiring substantive capital improvements. In this article, there is an extensive use of figures from the emergency plan document. These are primarily examples of site plans annotated for use in water distribution and water collection operational fact sheets. The intent of this article and the accompanying graphics is to illustrate a practical approach to emergency water supply plan documentation.