Articles
A view of L'Aquila
Safe&SuRe Helps Italian Town following Earthquake
In July this year, Professor Farmani and Dr Sweetapple travelled to L’Aquila in Italy with Professor Butler as part of his Safe&SuRe fellowship – a major EPSRC project to develop better urban water management in response to emerging challenges.
This trip focused on collaborative work with researchers from the Italian Water Research Institute and water company Gran Sasso Acqua S.p.A.
L’Aquila, a town near Rome, suffered major damage from an earthquake in 2009. Its water distribution system is currently being redesigned and rebuilt. This presented a good opportunity to use tools developed as part of the Safe&SuRe project. In particular, there was a ‘global resilience analysis’ of the newly designed network, which explored the potential effects of any future pipe failures on water supply. It captured the effects of large scale system failures, such as those that might be caused by an earthquake. It was a useful trip: the results highlighted many strengths of the new design, as well as areas susceptible to improvement.
Date: 3 August 2017