CEE’s Emily Kumpel Begins Fulbright Research on Intermittent Water Supplies

Content

More than 100 countries worldwide practice intermittent water supply, also known as water rationing, in their piped networks, thus resulting in many negative impacts on public health, infrastructure, and more. In response to this international problem, Associate Professor Emily Kumpel of the UMass Amherst Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department has begun a nine-month research project as a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar on “Measuring Continuity and Predictability in Water Systems” in India.

Kumpel is collaborating on her Fulbright project with Dr. Pradip Kalbar and other faculty from the Environmental Science and Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay. The cooperative research will be based on fieldwork and other methodologies in and around Mumbai, India.

The backstory to Kumpel’s research is that, as she explains, “Worldwide, at least one-billion people lack a continuous water supply; instead, water is delivered intermittently for a few hours per day or a few hours per week.” 

That huge population suffers various negative impacts on water quality, health, and household finances. In India, in particular, no major city has continuous water supply. 

As Kumpel expresses the ultimate purpose and projected impact of her research in India, “Defining and characterizing unpredictability in water delivery, as well as understanding the sources of unreliability in intermittent water supply, are essential to understanding how to improve access to safe and reliable water worldwide while managing scarce water supplies.” 

According to Kumpel, “The objectives of this research project are to: 1) develop metrics to define and characterize intermittent supply in terms of continuity and predictability; 2) pilot methods of measuring water delivery; and 3) determine and analyze sources of unpredictability in water systems.” 

Carrying out the objectives of Kumpel’s research promises to enhance the provision of safe and reliable water to populations across India as well as the U.S., where piped water systems are experiencing increasing outages due to aging infrastructures and climate change.

Kumpel’s Fulbright research will continue the focus in India and worldwide on improving the reliability, predictability, and service level offered by intermittent water supply. Many studies, including her own, have shown the resulting benefits of improving water delivery to water quality, human health, and socio-economic factors.

Kumpel concludes that her Fulbright research “would address a critical gap in our knowledge by giving us a more nuanced vocabulary for describing and measuring water-supply continuity and evaluating changes, whether from infrastructure improvements or climate. This is a topic of high interest to water managers and researchers globally.” 

Kumpel has established herself as a nationally recognized expert on intermittent water supply, as demonstrated by her 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER project called “Turning Home Water Storage from Risk into Reliability,” which the NSF funded for $549,834 over five years. Kumpel’s NSF research focuses on improving the water quality and reliability for myriad people worldwide who possess home-storage water tanks to utilize between intermittent water deliveries.