Upon determination of a possible contamination threat in a water distribution network, a variety of response actions (e.g., public notification and operational changes) can be pursued in order to minimize public health and economic impacts and ultimately return the utility to normal operations. Flushing is a relatively common operational response option employed by utilities to address water quality concerns. Previously, an optimal hydraulic response tool was developed to help identify the best hydrant locations to flush. However, in order to apply this tool the contaminant injection location needs to be known. In previous research efforts, either the injection location was assumed to be known, or a sensor coverage map, which displays all contamination incidents potentially detected by a sensor, was employed to identify all possible injection locations. While the flushing locations selected for a known source location were effective in reducing impacts, the locations selected based on sensor coverage maps were not as effective. Therefore, in this study, a source location algorithm based on an event backtracking analysis is used to identify the most likely source locations. An example network model and multiple injection locations are used to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach. In addition, the reduction in impacts between the three different source identification approaches (i.e., known, sensor coverage map, backtracking) were compared. Overall, knowing the contaminant injection location greatly influences the effectiveness of the flushing response. For this study, the smaller amount of possible source locations, the greater the reduction in impacts. If only one source location is identified, the impact reduction could be as high as 98%. However, when 18 possible sources were identified from the sensor coverage map approach, only a reduction of 2% was achieved.
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