MINIMIZING WATER LOSS FROM HYDRANT FLUSHING ACROSS ARMY INSTALLATIONS

Minimizing water loss from potable water distribution systems is a sustainable virtue. The U.S. Army in particular is invested in maintaining a resilient water supply that would be sufficient and reliable in a state of emergency. While there are many culprits to unnecessary water loss, hydrant flushing alone can sometimes be the primary use or rather loss of potable water. When flushed, highly treated, expensive and sometimes scarce water is essentially routed back to the treatment plant or is lost to storm sewer drains and the environment. It is true that potable water distribution systems need to undergo maintenance regularly (such as flushing) to keep them in safe operational order. However, losses can be minimized through optimization of the flushing protocol. It is our intention to review the available literature, identify best management practices, summarize the policy involved, survey current protocols in place at Army installations, and provide written and tool based recommendations for installation hydrant flushing. The survey revealed that as installation population increases we see a gradual increase in daily potable consumption. Notably, we see an even steeper increase in fire flow flushing consumption as population increases. This revealed that fire flow pressure testing accounted for the majority of lost flushing water in systems with a population over 15,000. Conversely, installations with less than 15,000 people tend to flush for other quality related reasons. And so, our recommendations are to use the technical report to dichotomously categorize the installation into one of a few flushing protocol categories and then follow the best management practices recommended for that cohort. Installations over 15,000 are more likely to have fire flow testing be their greatest loss and should therefore utilize the best management practices available to reduce those losses such as the use of diffusers. Installations of population less than 15,000 can further identify their concerns and sophisticate their quality control flushing to match their desired outcome and minimize losses. We believe that with these recommendations as well as with several exemplary installations optimized flushing protocols, bases can adopt flushing optimization practices Army wide.