EVALUATION OF HYDRAULIC PERFORMANCE AND SUSTAINABILITY OF WATER SUPPLY SYSTEM OF AGARO TOWN

Abstract

Provision of adequate water supply greatly contributesto the socioeconomic transformation by improving the living standard, health and thereby increasing productivity of the community. The problem of adequate water supply is severe in most developing countries like Ethiopian cities and town where increased urbanization, population growth, poor city planning, and shortage of sufficient resources create a combined effect. As a result, town water utilities are struggling to provide customers with adequate and reliable water supply service in spite of obstacles which hinder water utilities not to provide the required service. The objective of this study was to evaluate the hydraulic performance and sustainability of water supply system of Agaro town through technical performance indicators. Evaluating hydraulic performance and sustainability of a water supply are important to understand the shortage of water supply, coverage area and cost of expansion. Both primary and the secondary data were collected from Agaro town water and mine bureau, water supply and sewerage office, town administration office and field survey. WaterGEMSV8i, ArcGIS version10.5, Microsoft excel 2016 and GPS Garmin72 software’s were used to analysis the collected data. Steady state and extended period simulations were carried out for the distribution network and hydraulic parameters simulation values obtained for pressure and velocity. The simulated result of extended period shows that the performance of hydraulic parameters in the distribution network were pressure 32.47% for pressure value (<15m), 60.68 % for pressure value (15-60m) and 8 % for pressure value (>60m) head and the velocity of pipe flow show that 68.66 % for velocity <0.6 m/s, 12.67% for velocity ranging between 0.6-2m/s failed to achieve good performance. The sustainability of water supply was evaluated using performance indicator parameter of reliability, resiliency and vulnerability value of 0.61, 0.27 and 0.59 pressure and 0.12, 0.08 and 0.9 velocity value. The overall sustainability index was 0.245 which 0.09 for velocity and 0.4 for pressure. As a conclusion the existing water supply distribution network of Agaro town was un sustainable. Thus, the extended period simulation result of hydraulic performance pressure and velocity of the redesigned system are 95.54% and 93.49% respectively, were identified within acceptable ranges