Narrator: Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, public water suppliers are responsible for
making sure Americans have clean and safe drinking water. With increased natural disasters,
the potential for industrial accidents, and intentional contamination, water utilities
identified the need for full-scale testing of water security tools.
To fill that gap, EPA researchers collaborated with the Idaho National Laboratory, to develop
and build the Water Security Test Bed.
The Test Bed simulates a real drinking water distribution system.
Stephen Reese: The purpose behind building the water security test bed was to develop
a system where we could test ways to contaminate it so that we’re prepared to react to those
if that ever happens – how do you get a water system back up and running in the shortest
amount of time and probably most importantly when you turn that switch back on and you
tell people that the water is safe to drink that you have good scientific confidence that
it really is safe to drink.
Narrator: Over the next several years, EPA and its partners will conduct experiments
to mimic biological, chemical, and radioactive contamination in the Test Bed.
EPA will evaluate water infrastructure decontamination approaches including innovative technologies
to treat the resulting wash water.
This research benefits not only water utilities but also emergency responders, state and tribal
water quality managers, as well as industrial and commercial water users.
John Hall: Now you can do a lot in the laboratory with beakers and stuff but being able to do
it at a full-scale that we do here, there’s over 1000 gallons in this pipe, it’s a 400
foot pipe run and the fire hydrants we have are the same as they would be in a real city.
We think that we’re adding the real dimension of scale that you can’t get in a laboratory here.
Steve Reese: That’s what makes this test bed one of a kind is that we can test things
at scale.
The piping and everything is the same size as you would find in most municipal distribution
systems.
Jeff Szabo: Thus far its focused on two main categories.
One is decontamination of drinking water infrastructure and then treatment of contaminated water.
So the decontamination of infrastructure research focuses on injecting a chemical or
biological agents into the pipe, you know assessing how they stick, or persist on the interior of the pipe
material and looking at ways to get them out, whether that be things like flushing or adding
disinfectants or adding chemical agents to decontaminate the chemicals.
On the water treatment side, we look at wash water so if you were flushing contaminated
water out of the drinking water distribution system or or you have water thats been washed off of a
building after a contamination event, we’d like to know how to treat that water before
we do something with it.
Narrator: The research results from the Water Security Test Bed will assist water utilities
and their federal, state, tribal, and other partners to respond to water system contamination incidents
and other disruptions so water systems can be returned to service as quickly and safely
as possible.
Jim Goodrich: Emergency responders they really need to have confidence in what they are using
to decontaminate the water infrastructure and mitigate the public health risk when they
are out in an actual emergency.
As an organization, we’ve always been very interested in applied solutions and so that’s
always been a goal of ours to take all this great information at the bench and the pilot
scale and really bringing it to a point where its out into the environment and the utilities
and not just in a journal or academic articles.
And now the second phase is that we’ve added a copper service line going to a building,
as you would find in a house.
So now we have a full distribution system with a main pipeline, a service line, and
household appliances.
So we have internal plumbing, the premise plumbing, a water heater, refrigerator, dishwasher,
and clothes washer and a utility sink.
So we can look at decon and mitigation techniques for the drinking water utility as well as
the homeowner.
Narrator: EPA is opening up the Test Bed research capability to potential collaborators interested
in water security research.
The Test bed is also available for research to support routine water system operations
and to build long term resilience for water infrastructure in distribution systems around
the country.
Learn more at epa dot gov slash HS Research.