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Vulnerability Assessment and Risk Reduct
Vulnerability Assessment and Risk Reduct
Abstract
One of the concerns about future and existing dams is its safety and the possibility of
serious accidents including the dam failure, chemical and biological terrorism and natural
hazards. Vulnerability is a characteristic of a critical infrastructure’s design,
implementation, or operation that renders the basis susceptible to destruction or
incapacitation by a threat. Vulnerabilities may consist of flaws in security procedures,
software, internal system controls, or installation of infrastructure that may affect the
integrity, confidentiality, accountability, or availability of data or services. Vulnerability
assessments provide a systematic analysis of the utility’s susceptibility to an attack and
the means by which the utility can reduce its risk.
This paper reviews categories of vulnerability of the water supply system, and discusses
strategies for reducing them. Also, in order to assess the vulnerability, the actions/threats
that an adversary could take to keep a wastewater utility from are identified. Then the
specific assets (i.e., infrastructure, employees, information, or finances) that may be
impacted by the identified threats are identified. After evaluating existing
countermeasures, current risks associated with threats and assets are analyzed. Finally
additional countermeasures and prioritize based on a risk-reduction analysis are
recommended.
Introduction
Water is a fundamental resource for human and economic welfare and modern society
depends on complex, interconnected water infrastructure to provide reliable safe water
supplies and to remove and treat wastewater.
A general water supply system is composed of water sources, raw water transmission
pipes, water treatment plants, and water distribution networks. However, these
components and subsystems give the greatest opportunities for both natural and human-
related influences because most of them are spatially diverse and accessible. With respect
to this, researchers have identified the potential vulnerable areas during the process of
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delivering water from the sources to the customers as (see Figure 1): (1) water sources
(e.g., river, reservoir, and wells); (2) water treatment plant that removes impurities and
harmful agents and makes water suitable for domestic consumption and other uses; (3)
water distribution pipelines that deliver clean water on demand to homes, commercial
establishments, and industries; (4) storages (tanks); and (5) other facilities (Haestad et al.,
2003)
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Table 1: Natural hazards and human related threats to a water supply system
Threats and hazards Consequences
Natural hazards
Earthquake Pipe breaks
Loss of power
Structure collapse
Flooding Loss of treatment plant
Contamination of distribution system
Drought Water shortages
Water quality problem
Wind Flood-induced problems
Structure damage
Loss of power
Water born diseases Sickness
Death
Loss of public confidence
Severe weather Frozen pipes
Outages and leaks
High water use
Human-related Physical disruption of SCADA (supervisory control and data
threats acquisition) network
Attacks on central control system to create simultaneous failures
Cyber threats Electronic attacks using worms and viruses
Network flooding
Jamming
Disguising data to neutralize chlorine or add no disinfectant, allowing
addition of microbes
Physical threats Physical destruction of system’s assets or disruption of water supply is
more likely than contamination
Loss of water pressure compromising firefighting capabilities and could
lead to possible bacterial build-up in the system
Potential for creating a water hammer effect by opening and closing
major control valves and turning pumps on and off too quickly, which
could result in simultaneous main breaks.
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∑
in terms of exposure and access control. Vulnerability of a water system is defined as
n
V = vi (1)
i=1
Where α i is accessibility and subjectively scaled in [0, 1]; γ i is the degree of exposure
and subjectively scaled in [0, 1]. A low vulnerability score for a component is an
advantage. In this method, vulnerabilities for specific components are subjective (0 to 1)
and constructed from an attribute scale.
Then vulnerability of the subsystem or the overall system is calculated by Equation (1).
With the values of vulnerabilities, a rank order is obtained for a water supply system.
In this method only access and exposure are identified as the contributing factors to
vulnerability, which makes it more suitable to analyze the vulnerability related to external
hazards. However, for internal factors like deterioration of pipes due to changes of
surrounding conditions, access and exposure might not be the proper indicators to value
vulnerability. (Li et al, 2004)
Vulnerability analysis meets five basic objectives:
• Identification and quantification of hazards that can affect the system, whether they
are natural or derive from human activity;
• Estimation of the susceptibility to damage of components that are considered
essential to providing water in case of disaster;
• Definition of measures to be included in the mitigation plan, such as: retrofitting
projects, improvement of watersheds, and evaluation of foundations and structures.
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Identification components of
Natural
Man-made
Quality
Service
Determination of system
Structural
vulnerability
Operation
Guidelines and checklist
preparation
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The common elements of vulnerability assessment in water supply systems are viewed as
follows:
The complexity of vulnerability assessment ranges on the basis of the design and
operation of the water systems. With respect to this, several methods have been
developed to perform vulnerability assessment (Mays, 2004)
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It is obvious that the above definition of risk only considers the influences of threats or
hazards. Vulnerabilities of assets are also playing important roles in introducing risks
into the water supply system. Therefore, a modified definition of risk is formed as
Risk= (Likelihood × Severity) × Vulnerability (4)
where likelihood and severity represent the characteristics of a hazard or threat; while
vulnerability represents the property of an asset that is influenced by the hazard or threat.
In this definition, both hazards/threats and assets are explicitly considered. To give a risk
analysis of municipal water distribution system, ( Ezell et al, 2000) proposed a method
based on evaluation of component vulnerabilities which are assessed in terms of
exposure and access control. Risk assessment methodologies are often employed to help
understand what can go wrong, estimate the likelihood and the consequences, and to
develop risk mitigation strategies to counter risk.
When undertaking risk reduction measures it is also necessary to define the location of a
potential hazard, its severity, return period and the probability of expected levels of loss.
It is necessary to differentiate between much localized events and national, regional and
global impacts.
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4- Case study
A water supply reservoir that serves a major city is selected. It supplies 200 cubic meters
per year. A schematic of the water supply system is presented in Figure 5. The reservoir
is a part of a water system supply that the vulnerability of its components is assessed
based on different criteria using questionnaires from experts. The criteria are considered
as the distribution, spread (the extend of a physical magnitude), visibility, exposure and
recovery. In four levels of qualitative assessment, the components are marked as low,
medium, high and very high. The linguistic marks are presented in Table 2. The
economic and human losses are considered as the results and shown in Figure 6. The
results show the losses from the dam are considerable and action plans are needed for
dam vulnerability reduction. The risk reduction strategies for the reservoir include the
increasing resistance of its structure, improving the warning systems and limiting of
accessible roads to the dam.
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Figure 7 shows the vulnerability capability based on different criteria for each water
supply system components. In order to generate the figures the numbers 1,2,3 and 4 are
assigned as low, medium, high and very high as a degree of each criteria. High
vulnerability is due to the extent of influence zone (Colored area). Figure 7 shows the
dam and distribution network has high vulnerability capability and groundwater resources
have low vulnerability capability. Therefore, groundwater is an alternative for water
supply while system failure. Also the development of the online monitoring and warning
system along the river and the distribution network are recommitted to reduce their risk.
Monitoring systems enable continuous monitoring of water quality and quantity in order
to control process and emissions just-on-time. Water quality monitoring helps link
sources of pollution to a stream quality problem because it identifies specific problem
pollutants. Since certain activities tend to generate certain pollutants (e.g., bacteria and
nutrients are more likely to come from an animal feedlot than an automotive repair shop),
a tentative link might be made that would warrant further investigation or monitoring.
After measuring desired parameters the information will be transferred where it is needed
e.g. internet, automation system or the use of personnel. It’s also possible to get alarms
by SMS when some alarm limit exceeds.
Early warning strategy is very important in vulnerability reduction. The objective is
towards preventive concepts from responsive strategy which leads to maximize the
operational response to an emergency by activating warning systems and using
communication systems to minimize the loss of life, damage to housing and
infrastructure.
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Distribution
4
3
2
Recovery 1 Area
0
Identification
Expose
capability
Distribution
4
3
2
Recovery 1 Area
0
Identification
Expose
capability
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World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2010: 4426
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