Magbanlag Loury Joy N.

J15-50233

“WATER SUPPLY SYSTEM”

Introduction

Water for human consumption comes from one of two basic sources. First, water from a well to
supply an individual residence, well water for farmstead properties, and well water for small
public sector properties that include schools, public buildings, and small commercial enterprises
and second is the municipal water systems that provide potable water to a wide array of
commercial property and domestic use buildings including apartments, condominiums, duplex
housing, and single family dwellings. Understanding the fundamentals of a municipal water
supply delivery system is essential to closely examining the many features of a water system and
the many options in designing a water delivery system. A water supply system is analogous to
the human circulatory system. The heart pumps blood through the arteries, veins, and capillaries
to supply oxygen to all part of the body. A water pump supplies water through primary,
secondary, and distributor water mains to supply water to consumers and for fire protection.

The purpose of municipal water delivery systems is to transport potable water from a water
treatment facility to residential consumers, for use as drinking water, water for cooking, water
for sanitary conditions, and other water use in a domestic environment. Water supply also is
essential for business and industry to operate in a municipal environment. Of no less importance
is the need to supply water to properly located fire hydrants to provide the public with an
effective level of fire protection. Municipal water systems also may need to provide water for
special services that include street cleaning, the selling of water to contractors for erecting
buildings, parks and recreation, and miscellaneous uses. A water system has two primary
requirements: First, it needs to deliver adequate amounts of water to meet consumer consumption
requirements plus needed fire flow requirements. Second, the water system needs to be reliable;
the required amount of water needs to be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

A municipal water supply system cannot service its customers unless there is a continuous
supply of water to meet domestic consumption needs in the broadest sense and water needs for
structural fire protection. Water sources need to be selected carefully to make sure that this
fundamental requirement is met.
Two main factors that affect water supply selection are
1) Quality of water: Water must be treated or purified to meet Regulatory Requirements
established by the EPA (United States Government). The requirements are divided into 2
categories:
a) Residential communities with populations not exceeding 3,000; and
b) Combined residential and commercial communities that serve a population demand over
3,000.
2) Quantity of water: The quantity of water must be adequate to meet consumer
consumption and fire flow demands at any time of the day, day of week, and week of the
year. Maintaining a continuous or uninterrupted supply of water for municipal demands
is a major challenge to many municipalities because of the following conditions:
  Droughts;
 Growing demands that cannot be met by the treatment plant;
 Other communities drawing water from the same supply sources such as a lake or a river;
 A major commercial fire or wild land/urban interface fire that exhausts the water supply;
and
 Undetected underground leakage on the pipe distribution system.
A municipality must recognize that the quantity of available water needs to be such that
maximum daily consumption demands are satisfied at all times, even during periods of drought
or after years of community growth. The water delivery system needs to expand as the
municipality expands.

Design Considerations of Water Systems

In the design and construction of community water systems, economics are extremely important.
This dictates that the source of supply should be selected so that little maintenance for the
operational factors will be required to furnish an adequate supply of water to the community.
Even though surface water supplies such as lakes and rivers, with proper treatments, are by far
the more suitable from the standpoint of adequacy, the use of surface water supply systems is
confined to municipalities that have a water demand in excess of 75,000 gallons per day
domestic consumption to be economically feasible. This translates to a community of about 300
residents with 12 commercial establishments, but with no manufacturing, and the ability to
supply a fire flow of 500 gallons per minute (gpm) for 2 hours. This also means that ground
water sources are suitable only for quite small communities typically found in more rural areas
of the country.

There are two fundamental considerations for both designing and evaluating municipal water
supply systems. The first and most important is the quality of the water for human consumption
—drinking water. The second is the quantity of water required. In recent years the standards for
water quality have been transferred from State health control agencies to the Federal government
through two organizations:
1) The United Sates Public Health Service.
2) The EPA.

The quality of water provided by a municipal water system is based on three distinct
characteristics, each of which may independently govern the desirable portability of the water.
These characteristics are
 Physical quality of water
 Bacterial quality of water
 Water chemistry

The quantity of water may base on the consideration of Municipal Water System Demands.
Wherein the demand for water supplied by a municipal water system has two driving
components:
1) Consumer consumption- assessed by determining the amount of water that actually is
used by consumers, based on three levels of usage as follows:
 Average daily consumption (ADC)
 Maximum Daily Consumption (MDC)
  Instantaneous flow demand
2) An adequate and reliable water supply for fire protection

One of the considerations of designing a water system is to classify it whether it is a fresh water,
salt water or reclaimed

System Evaluation and Design

The designing and evaluating of community water supply distribution systems has to consider
the amount of water for the commercial interests, governmental property, educational facilities,
and all classifications of residential property as presented above in a general relationship to
average and maximum daily consumption demand. At any time of the day, the day of the week,
or the week of a given year, a structure fire or other fire emergency such as transportation vehicle
fires or, in some cases, natural cover fires may erupt. Water is the primary agent of choice to
confine, control, and extinguish structural fires. Some new development in fire extinguishing
agents may be used for rapid knockdown of a fire, but a well-developed structure fire still
requires established needed fire flows from fire hydrants to control and extinguish developing
fires. Each community needs to evaluate and design or modify the design of the community
water system to meet present-day needs to address future demands based on growth of the built
area and population increases, along with the need to meet EPA criteria for water quality. This
will be an ever-increasing demand and challenge for every community water distribution system.

Some specific guidelines on consumer consumption requirements and needed fire flows are
established by the ISO, which represents in excess of 130 property and casualty underwriters in
the United States in developing advisory insurance rates. The following topics address some
fundamental information on understanding
1) Water system demands,
2) Determining design flow, and the very important topic of
3) Water storage on a community water system.

Basic Concepts in Determining Design Flow at System Demand Points

The first step in evaluating or designing a water delivery system is to determine design flows for
all of the representative built-upon regions of the community and the community expansion
plans. The fundamentals of calculating water system design flow are as follows:
1) Determine the average daily demand
2) Determine the maximum daily demand or estimate it from the average daily demand.
3) Determine the maximum hourly demand from consumption records or for new areas of
the community, estimate from the average daily rate.
4) Determine the ISO needed fire flow
5) Determine the required flow for sprinkler system requirements plus a supplemental
allowance for fire streams if a commercial property is protected by an automatic sprinkler
system.
6) Select an appropriate design flow for the community water system. This is the greater of
the following two conditions: either the sum of the required fire flow for the most
stringent situation which, not considering property protected by automatic sprinklers, plus
 the maximum daily consumption demand; or the maximum hourly demand, whichever is
greater.
The community water supply planning group must exercise good judgment based on the facts at
this point. The following example makes this point very clear. It relates to communities that have
manufacturing plants or seasonal agricultural processing and canning plants.

In this example, the property in question is identified as a manufacturing facility that uses large
amounts of water for only 8 hours during one shift per day, 5 days a week. With relatively little
domestic use, the maximum hourly demand would be in excess of what the water supply
committee would expect from normal projection data and examining the average daily demand.
In this case, the water system serving the facility should be designed to provide the required flow
plus the maximum hourly flow. It would be costly and essentially irresponsible to consider
treating a fire at this facility on the basis of an average daily demand that has no real meaning in
the particular context. Furthermore, commercial properties that have a high peak demand for
short periods of time should work with the community to provide private water storage to meet
these peak periods. This could save major water treatment costs and pipe design costs to
transport water to these specific demand points that have an infrequent need for the supply.

CONCLUSIONS
It is very important to design and evaluate a given water system using the design flow as
generally determined by the above considerations so as to ensure the adequacy and reliability of
the system. Therefore, it is essential that all of the issues relating to water system adequacy and
reliability be considered carefully when considering the future design of a new or existing
community water system.