Catastrophic Water Pipe Rupture Affects Boston

A single water pipe rupture in Weston, MA has affected the availability of water for 2 million in the Boston area. Ironically, this huge pipe is less than a decade old. There is speculation that the cause of the failure was in the rubber sleeves.

Boston receives its water from the Quabbin reservoir, which is located not far from Amherst, in western Massachusetts. The Quabbin was formed decades ago by destroying homes and relocating people. Cambridge has its own water supply and was not affected.

The Boston Globe has a report on this catastrophic failure in which the loss of a single critical network link is affecting millions. People in the affected towns (east of Weston) are required to boil the water that they consume for a minute. There is backup water for bathing and flushing toilets (but not for drinking).

The planners and engineers were concerned that such a failure might happen but could not construct a redundant link in time (it is scheduled to be completed in 2014).

According to the Globe: “You always need redundancy,’’ said Joe Favaloro, executive director of the MWRA advisory board, which advocates for ratepayers. He said it was unclear how bad the problem is, and what costs would eventually fall to ratepayers.

“You don’t budget for catastrophic failures on pipes less than a decade old,’’ he said. “The irony is of course that the [much older] tunnel is fine. The piece that collapsed is less than a decade old.’’

Also, according to the Globe: Water authority spokeswoman Ria Convery said that the authority, working with the Boston Water and Sewer Commission, was able to reconfigure the water pipe lines in the Longwood Medical Area. That temporary fix allowed four major hospitals in the area — Children’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital — to go about business as usual, without having to resort to bottled water. These are premier medical institutions and, thank goodness, there is clean water for the patients and staff members there.

A colleague (and former doctoral student of mine), who is now a Visiting Scholar at UMass Amherst, and is a tenured faculty member at the University of Sydney in Australia, is spending this weekend in Boston. His wife arrived from Sydney at Logan this past Friday and since they had not seen each other since he began his sabbatical two months ago at the Isenberg School, they are spending this weekend in Boston. The weather has been glorious but without clean tap water, the store shelves have been emptied of bottled water and one has to be very careful about what one is drinking (and eating, frankly).

I do hope, for everyone's sake, that this huge problem is corrected as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. The themes of the Fragile Networks book that I co-authored with Patrick Qiang continue to make the news on a (much too) regular basis.

Management of Water Resources, Optimization and Simulation

Tomorrow, November 6, 2009, we will be hosting Professor Richard Palmer, who is Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UMass Amherst, in our Fall 2009 UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. He will be speaking at 11:00AM in the Isenberg School of Management and more information about Professor Palmer and his presentation, which will focus on optimizing water reservoir operations, can be found here.

Professor Palmer is relatively new to UMass Amherst having come from the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, which, coincidentally, is the same institution at which my doctoral dissertation advisor, Professor Stella Dafermos, received her PhD. In fact, they both received their PhDs from the very same department. Professor Palmer has done a lot of award-winning, fascinating research on the modeling of water resources and management and will be speaking tomorrow on both the use of optimization techniques and simulation in reservoir operations.

We are delighted that he accepted our invitation and we are certain that we will learn a lot from his presentation.

Last week we did not have a speaker (Professor Palmer is the fourth speaker in our series this Fall) and an undergraduate student of mine sent me a message that he was so disappointed since he learns so much from our speakers and he organizes his Fridays around the lectures. This was such a kind and thoughtful message to receive and makes the work involved in organizing, hosting, and following through with the Speaker Series all the more worthwhile! Also, I very much believe that great speakers spark students' interests in a discipline and that is one reason that I continue (for 11 semesters now) to be so involved in this Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science.

I would also like to bring to your attention the upcoming talk on November 20 by Professor Sam Bowles, whose co-authored article just appeared in Science on October 30, complete with a commentary co-authored by Professor Daron Acemoglu of MIT, who kicked off our Fall 2008 Speaker Series! NSF even released a press release about this research and you can read more about it here.

On December 4, we will be hosting the talk of Professor Brain Levine of the Computer Science Department who will speak on cyberforensics.

These talks are open to the public. The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter does a wonderful job of helping me to organize this Speaker Series.