Developing Urban Water Infrastructure Modeling Approach to Control Flood Damages and Reduce Life Cycle Impacts

In recent years, decentralized approaches in urban water engineering have been studied due to their low environmental impacts and their ability to control stormwater quantity and quality in urban areas. In this paper, sustainability aspects of decentralizing urban water infrastructure systems have been studied through a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) software package, namely Economic and Environmental Analysis of Sanitation Technologies (EEAST), and compared with the current condition (centralized infrastructure). Specifically, rainwater harvesting (RWH) has been selected as the decentralized infrastructure for a case study watershed in Toledo, Ohio. RWH is one of several types of low impact development (LID) tools that has been widely used to control urban floods and runoff water quality according to its quality and quantity aspects. For urban water system modeling in this study PCSWWM has been employed. The model has been driven by using 24-hour design storm event, and then the volume of runoff and life cycle impacts of cisterns has been studied after implementation of RWH systems. The results indicate that implementation of cisterns proposed by EEAST can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and flood volume in the study area.