Leveraging water-wastewater data interdependencies to understand infrastructure systems’ behaviors during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Social distancing policies (SDPs) implemented worldwide in response to COVID-19 pandemic have led to spatiotemporal variations in water demand and wastewater flow, creating potential operational and service-related quality issues in water-sector infrastructure. Understanding water-demand variations is especially challenging in contexts with limited availability of smart meter infrastructure, hindering utilities' ability to respond in real time to identified system vulnerabilities. Leveraging water and wastewater infrastructures' interdependencies, this study proposes the use of high-granular wastewater-flow data as a proxy to understand both water and wastewater systems’ behaviors during active SDPs. Enabled by a random-effects model of wastewater flow in an urban metropolitan city in Texas, we explore the impacts of various SDPs (e.g., stay home-work safe, reopening phases) using daily flow data gathered between March 19, 2019, and December 31, 2020. Results indicate an increase in residential flow that offset a decrease in nonresidential flow, demonstrating a spatial redistribution of wastewater flow during the stay home-work safe period. Our results show that the three reopening phases had statistically significant relationships to wastewater flow. While this yielded only marginal net effects on overall wastewater flow, it serves as an indicator of behavioral changes in water demand at sub-system spatial scales given demand-flow interdependencies. Our assessment should enable utilities without smart meters in their water system to proactively target their operational response during pandemics, such as (1) monitoring wastewater-flow velocity to alleviate potential blockages in sewer pipes in case of decreased flows, and (2) closely investigating any consequential water-quality problems due to decreased demands.