Abstract:
The three pillars indicating a safely managed water supply under the United Nations Sustainable Development goals are that households have water that is free of contamination, located on-premises, and available when needed. While many people worldwide have a water supply that can be drawn continuously and on-demand from pipes or pumps, supplying water on-premise and when needed, billions of others lack a continuous water supply. More than one billion people worldwide receive supply from their piped water only intermittently, where water comes through pipes for only limited hours per day or hours per week. Even those with continuous piped water supplies may experience interruptions, which are expected to increase as climate change, water scarcity, extreme events, and aging infrastructure cause brief or prolonged water outages. This talk will define metrics for characterizing the features of intermittent water supply worldwide and a structured evaluation of their impacts and using case studies of water systems from Hubli-Dharwad, India; Machakos, Kenya; and Mexico City, Mexico to evaluate the impacts on people, infrastructure, and utilities, and to evaluate the variety of system-level and building-level pathways for improving water supply reliability.
Bio:
Dr. Emily Kumpel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has an M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Dr Kumpel’s research is focused on understanding and improving the complex engineered, environmental, and human systems that enable the provision of safe, reliable, and sustainable drinking water. She has over a decade of experience conducting research on topics including water quality in distribution systems, water access and equity, water quality monitoring, environmental health, and data science for water and sanitation infrastructure. She is a leading international expert on the water quality and health impacts of intermittent water supplies and is a committee member for an International Water Association Intermittent Water Supply Specialist Group. She has published more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers and maintains a diverse research portfolio supported by federal, state, and foundation funding. She recently received an NSF CAREER award, “Turning Home Water Storage from Risk into Reliability.”. Prior to joining the faculty at UMass, Dr. Kumpel was a Senior Research Scientist with the Aquaya Institute, where she was based in Nairobi, Kenya, for three years and engaged in research water quality monitoring and impact evaluations. She has active projects in the US, India, and Kenya.