How the impacts of burst water mains are influenced by soil sand content

Farewell, Timothy S.; Jude, Simon; Pritchard, Oliver

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2951-2018

Articles | Volume 18, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2951-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2951-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 11

Research article

|

09 Nov 2018

Research article |

| 09 Nov 2018

How the impacts of burst water mains are influenced by soil sand content

Timothy S. Farewell, Simon Jude, and Oliver Pritchard

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Final revised paper (published on 09 Nov 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 12 Dec 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'A Network and Performance Managers View', Timothy Acland, 02 Jan 2018
- AC1: 'Response to T. Acland's comments', Tim Farewell, 17 Apr 2018
RC2: 'Review of “The influence of soil on the impacts of burst water mains on infrastructure and society: A mixed methods investigation”', Kewan Mertens, 18 Mar 2018
- AC2: 'Response to K. Mertens' comments', Tim Farewell, 17 Apr 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (23 Apr 2018) by Thomas Glade

AR by Lorena Grabowski on behalf of the Authors (05 Jun 2018) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (08 Jul 2018) by Thomas Glade

RR by Timothy Acland (17 Jul 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Page 3, line 8. It is better to say 'up to' rather than 'less than'.

Page 11, para 4.2. This leads into a significant conclusion and I feel that this para may be made more robust to support the conclusion. The result for sandy soils burst repeats is new knowledge and may be more prominent. Further these details are open to criticism from any less informed readers. By using repeats in up to the 10m/10d criterion there is the risk of including reworked jobs following premature failure of the first repair. The data used has been reviewed by several parts of that business including contract payments as work carries a guarantee the data is checked to ensure no repeat work is included; all data used were independent repairs. This fact may need to be emphasised and hence the result and significant conclusion are fully valid.

Page 17, lines 11 & 12. I don't understand this sentence. At least a word is missing.

Page 20, line 21. Whilst historically true, there is a lot of new technology being applied to infrastructure monitoring right now that is expected to be cost effective. This sentence may be rephrased.

Page 21, line 15. The data for the water industry is already available in the National Failures Database (NFD) held by the UK Water Industry Research organisation (UKWIR). Further development of the analytical methodology proposed by this paper requires similar data from Highways and other infrastructure industries.

Page 21, line 27. Societal impacts in some ways are recorded within the water industry. The duration of supply interruptions is another performance measure (e.g. the old DG3) that is reportable to OFWAT, so data is available. In fact it is now two measures, one is properties off water for a long time and the other is proportion of properties off water by minutes.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (10 Aug 2018) by Thomas Glade

AR by Tim Farewell on behalf of the Authors (17 Aug 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (21 Aug 2018) by Thomas Glade

Short summary

Sinkholes capture the attention of residents and local media. Cars fall through roads into holes caused by water escaping from burst water mains. To determine where impacts from burst pipes on other infrastructure are most likely, we investigated soil maps, infrastructure records and local media reports, and held workshops and interviews with infrastructure companies. We found that burst mains in high sand content soils were much more likely to impact roads, gas pipes, buildings and sewers.