Water supply network rehabilitation: A case study

Serino, Southern Italy, known by the locals as “il paese dell’acqua” which translated reads as ”the town of waters”, suffers recurrent water shortages due to the obsolescence of the local water supply network. Such a circumstance sets up a paradox since the “Serino aqueduct” alone supplies Naples, the capital of Campania Region and its neighbourhood, with a discharge of approximately 1–3.5 m3/s (Fiorillo et al., 2007). Belonging to the well known Terminio karst aquifer, moderately conditioned by groundwater abstraction (Pagnozzi et al., 2017), Serino springs have being exploited since long time. Consider that the Serino aqueduct, also known as Aqua Augusta, was built during the Augustus period, almost certainly at the end of the 1st century B.C., when Marco Agrippa was the curator aquarum of the Roman Empire (De Feo and Napoli, 2007). Karst aquifers represent a fundamental resource as they supply drinkable water to about a quarter of the world’s population including European cities such as London, Paris, Rome and Vienna (Ford and Williams, 2007). The rehabilitation of water supply networks is a crucial aspect of sustainable urban development in a scenario where strategies for limiting the effects of climate change have to be taken into account to preserve water quality. Unfortunately, most water utilities do not developed a long-term decision making approach to prevent the aging of pipes and degradation of hydraulic manufacts. It is common to take decisions on a year-to-year base which elements of the water supply system should be rehabilitated or, even worse, on impeding emergency calls. Numerous rehabilitation strategies have been presented in the literature, e.g. Engelhardt et al., 2000; Scholten et al., 2014; Shin et al., 2016, as well as related applications (Aşchilean and Giurca, 2018; Viccione et al., 2018). The purpose of the paper is to discuss the rehabilitation of a water supply network with reference to a case study