A Quantitative Approach to Military Water System Vulnerability Assessments
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Date
2014-05-09
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
The Department of the Army routinely conducts water system vulnerability assessment (WSVA) on military water distribution systems (WDS). Risk assessors construct attack scenarios and then estimate the risks using their expert judgment. These risk assessments are traditionally difficult to support with evidence and historical data. As a result, decision makers often question the validity of the assessor findings and their recommendations. The goal of this research paper is to improve the WSVA program by presenting decision makers with quantifiable risk. I propose a hybrid risk analysis based on hydraulic modeling and probabilistic risk analysis. This improved methodology (WSVA2) presents a quantitative approach to risk assessment and uses simulations to support the assessor’s expert judgment. A fictitious military WDS and its data are created to avoid disclosure of sensitive information. Hydraulic simulation models are used to assess the consequences of a successful contamination attack and to evaluate the outcome of a catastrophic scenario. Three unknowns of the scenarios are the contaminant toxicity, contaminant reaction rate in water and contaminant quantity used in the attack. Attack simulations are randomly generated using distribution curves based on both known studies and assumptions. Monte Carlo simulations are used to quantify the uncertainties of the model. Findings show that 53,126 Exposure Incidents (EI) resulted from the contamination attack on Water Tower 1. In the catastrophic scenario, over 400,000 EI occurred in 1 week which affected over 4,000 people in the Hexagon Building. And in an attack-response scenario, hydraulic modeling is used to demonstrate that the current Emergency Response Plan (ERP) cannot sufficiently mitigate the contamination threat below Military Exposure Guideline (MEG) level.
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Keywords
military, water distribution system, risk analysis, expert judgment, simulations, catastrophic, contaminant, monte carlo, hydraulic modeling, exposure, multi attribute utility theory, emergency response plan, mitigation, military exposure guideline