A New Type of Risk Map for Municipal Sewerage Systems

A revolutionary concept in the elaboration of a risk map in municipal sewerage systems is presented, based on a coherent and fully functional model of the sewerage network (Ciutac, 2011).The starting point is a frequent situation, when at the entrance of the wastewater treatment plant; a sudden increase of a pollutant concentration is recorded. In this case, there was a clear spillover in one of the intakes of the network. The pollutant can damage the wastewater treatment plant or can be out of the plant's processing capacity. Under those circumstances, a “detective” activity has to be performed in order to discover the injection point where the spillover has taken place, as the source of pollution.The paper presents a methodology and an algorithm which will allow the establishment of the most likely area where such intake points can be located, based on the measured values at the intake of the wastewater treatment plant and on the model of the sewerage network. The algorithm has the advantage that it can be easily used in conjunction with any sewerage networks modeling software package.