Enhancing Drinking Water Treatment Resilience to Wildfire Events
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Associated Project
Project 5168: Enhancing Drinking Water Treatment Resilience to Wildfire EventsWater utilities are seeking ways to increase resilience of their surface water treatment facilities against the rising risk of extreme wildfires. Wildfires can increase turbidity, organic matter, metals, and nutrient concentrations in source waters, which can challenge conventional treatment unit processes.
The Water Research Foundation (WRF) project 5168, Enhancing Drinking Water Treatment Resilience to Wildfire Events, provides guidance to drinking water utilities to help increase treatment resilience to wildfires and will be the feature of this webcast.
Researchers collected over 500 gallons of wildfire ash from five different wildfires across the Pacific Northwest region. Using these samples they investigated impacts of wildfires on source water quality for drinking water and assessed implications to treatability for a variety of treatment processes at both bench scale and pilot scale. Using dual pilot-scale treatment trains, pilot-scale testing explored operational responses to post-wildfire scenarios for a complete treatment train over an extended duration.
Presenters will share the resilience of different coagulation, oxidation, and filtration approaches and how these approaches were quantified by assessing filter productivity, particle removal, solids production, and disinfection byproduct control. Presenters will also share treatment resilience frameworks, highlighting design and operational responses that utilities can make in a post-fire situation to help increase resilience of drinking water treatment systems against possible upsets in an unknown future. The experience and insights gained from WRF project 5168 can be broadly applicable for resilience to wildfire events by utilities and municipalities.