Unlike municipal water supplies, provincial regulations do not require systematic testing of domestic well water, which may adversely impact local residents should contamination occur. Private wells are typically shallow relative to municipal wells, and thus, are particularly vulnerable to sources of surficial contamination if preferential recharge pathways such as natural fractures or faulty seals are present. In order to determine the relative importance of well seal integrity as a preferential pathway, a practical detection method was developed based on infiltrometry. This method successfully detected faulty well seals in a wide range of geological settings across Canada, including: Hobbema, Alberta; Lindsay, Ontario; and Chelsea, Québec. It was most successful in areas of minimal heterogeneity and where the surficial geology is composed of fine-grained sediments. The community of Chelsea (Québec) was also the primary study site to examine a range of factors affecting water quality including physical characteristics, faulty well seals, other anthropogenic activities and seasonality. Water samples were collected over a period of 14 months and analyzed for bacteria and major-ion chemistry. The results show that the consideration of physical features alone is not enough to predict vulnerability in the study area. Seasonal fluctuations in ionic concentrations (e.g. ionic strength, NO3-N and Cl-) and coliform bacteria are observed and result from disperse and rapid recharge events. Multivariate analysis techniques (e.g. principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis) demonstrate that preferential recharge pathways and anthropogenic activities, such as domestic effluents affect the groundwater quality. The data and findings of this study were used to assist in the design of a probabilistic risk assessment model based on the Poisson distribution. This study demonstrates the complexity and the challenges related to bacterial contamination in drilled wells. In spite of these challenges, this analysis was useful as a baseline to assess the impact of anthropogenic activities, and may be used in future studies to assist municipalities in the evaluation and protection of groundwater supplies.

Unlike municipal water supplies, provincial regulations do not require systematic testing of domestic well water, which may adversely impact local residents should contamination occur. Private wells are typically shallow relative to municipal wells, and thus, are particularly vulnerable to sources of surficial contamination if preferential recharge pathways such as natural fractures or faulty seals are present. In order to determine the relative importance of well seal integrity as a preferential pathway, a practical detection method was developed based on infiltrometry. This method successfully detected faulty well seals in a wide range of geological settings across Canada, including: Hobbema, Alberta; Lindsay, Ontario; and Chelsea, Québec. It was most successful in areas of minimal heterogeneity and where the surficial geology is composed of fine-grained sediments. The community of Chelsea (Québec) was also the primary study site to examine a range of factors affecting water quality including physical characteristics, faulty well seals, other anthropogenic activities and seasonality. Water samples were collected over a period of 14 months and analyzed for bacteria and major-ion chemistry. The results show that the consideration of physical features alone is not enough to predict vulnerability in the study area. Seasonal fluctuations in ionic concentrations (e.g. ionic strength, NO3-N and Cl-) and coliform bacteria are observed and result from disperse and rapid recharge events. Multivariate analysis techniques (e.g. principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis) demonstrate that preferential recharge pathways and anthropogenic activities, such as domestic effluents affect the groundwater quality. The data and findings of this study were used to assist in the design of a probabilistic risk assessment model based on the Poisson distribution. This study demonstrates the complexity and the challenges related to bacterial contamination in drilled wells. In spite of these challenges, this analysis was useful as a baseline to assess the impact of anthropogenic activities, and may be used in future studies to assist municipalities in the evaluation and protection of groundwater supplies.

In this thesis, security measures and vulnerability mitigation are mainly addressed. How to improve the system vulnerability is one of the main issues for power system operation and planning. Recent research revealed that Energy Storage Systems (ESSs) have a great potential to be used to improve system vulnerability. A vulnerability assessment is proposed in this thesis to identify the impact factors in the power systems due to generation outage and line outage. A Bus Impact Severity (BIS) analysis is then proposed and used to find the vulnerable buses in the system. The buses with the larger BIS value defined in this thesis are the better locations for ESSs placement. Formulations for optimal locations and capacities of ESSs placement are derived and then solved by Genetic Algorithm (GA). Test results show that the proposed method can be used to find the optimal locations and capacities for ESSs for system vulnerability improvement.

This dissertation examines the interdependence between urban water distribution systems and urban fire response. The focus on interdependent critical infrastructures is driven by concern for security of water systems and the effects on related infrastructures if water distribution systems are damaged by terrorist attack or natural disaster. A model of interdependent infrastructures (principally water distribution systems and fire response) is developed called the Model of Urban Fire Spread (MUFS). The model includes the capacity to simulate firefighting water demands in a community water system hydraulic model, building-to-building urban fire spread, and suppression activities. MUFS is an improvement over previous similar models because it allows simulation of urban fires at the level of individual buildings and it permits simulation of interdependent infrastructures working in concert. MUFS is used to simulate a series of multi-mode attacks and failures (MMAFs) – events which disable the water distribution system and simultaneously ignite an urban fire. The consequences of MMAF scenarios are analyzed to determine the most serious modes of infrastructure failure and urban fire ignition. Various methods to determine worst-case configurations of urban fire ignition points are also examined. These MMAF scenarios are used to inform the design of potential mitigation measures to decrease the consequences of the urban fire. The effectiveness of mitigation methods is determined using the MUFS simulation tool. Novel metrics are developed to quantify the effectiveness of the mitigation methods from the time-series development of their consequences. A cost-benefit analysis of the various mitigation measures is conducted to provide additional insight into the methods’ effectiveness and better inform the decision-making process of selecting mitigation methods. Planned future work includes further refinement of the representation of fire propagation and suppression in MUFS and investigation of historical MMAF events to validate simulation predictions. Future efforts will continue development of appropriate optimization methods for determining worst-case MMAF scenarios. This work should be of interest to water utility managers and emergency planners, who can adapt the methodology to analyze their communities’ vulnerability to MMAFs and design mitigation techniques to meet their unique needs, as well as to researchers interested in infrastructure modeling and disaster simulation.

Emergency response teams, need various internal information about facilities such as building usage type, number of floors, occupancy information, building contents and vulnerable locations in facility during and immediately after multi hazard emergencies. Accessing such information accurately and timely is very important in order to speed up the guidance of occupants in a facility that is under the effect of multi-hazards to safe exits and speed up the decision process of emergency response teams to identify vulnerable locations (e.g. locations where secondary disasters can arise following an earthquake / fires, explosions). In the current practice, emergency response teams access such vital information to respond the emergency by visual investigating the environment and by asking the people in the neighborhood which causes gaining wrong and misleading information and results in loosing time and increasing the hazardous effect of emergency. Hence, there is a need for an approach to enable emergency response teams to access timely and accurate needed information items. To start the first step of this approach, the information items needed by emergency response teams to guide occupants the safe exits, to direct emergency response teams to vulnerable locations of the facility are identified and classified. Identified information items will be represented to emergency response teams by a model based system (BIM). The opportunities of model based system (BIM) will enable fast and safe evacuation of the facility, identification of vulnerable locations within the facility in a multi hazard emergency.

Monitoring volumes of malicious network data for across multiple sources can potentially be overwhelming. As a result, vital data is at a greater risk of being overlooked and the time span for analyzing it could be too lengthy. One way to address this issue is to employ network security visualization techniques to evaluate security risks and identify malicious activity to help mitigate compromised nodes on a network. The purpose of this thesis is to introduce a visualization framework to help reduce task-completion time, enhance situational awareness, and decrease user error of complex visualizations for network security applications. From the developed framework, three techniques are suggested as contributions using visualization and interaction: (1) Stereoscopic visualization technique aims to increase user awareness of vulnerabilities and malicious attacks, (2) the recommender system aims to ensure efficient navigation in complex 3D environments, and (3) an interaction system aims to assist in usability of visualization environments using Natural User Interfaces (NUIs). To investigate the aforementioned techniques, the following tools were created: 3D Stereoscopic Vulnerability Assessment Tool (3DSVAT), Parallel 3D Coordinate Visualization (P3D), NAVSEC recommender system, and Interaction System for Network Security (InterSec).

Unlike municipal water supplies, provincial regulations do not require systematic testing of domestic well water, which may adversely impact local residents should contamination occur. Private wells are typically shallow relative to municipal wells, and thus, are particularly vulnerable to sources of surficial contamination if preferential recharge pathways such as natural fractures or faulty seals are present. In order to determine the relative importance of well seal integrity as a preferential pathway, a practical detection method was developed based on infiltrometry. This method successfully detected faulty well seals in a wide range of geological settings across Canada, including: Hobbema, Alberta; Lindsay, Ontario; and Chelsea, Québec. It was most successful in areas of minimal heterogeneity and where the surficial geology is composed of fine-grained sediments. The community of Chelsea (Québec) was also the primary study site to examine a range of factors affecting water quality including physical characteristics, faulty well seals, other anthropogenic activities and seasonality. Water samples were collected over a period of 14 months and analyzed for bacteria and major-ion chemistry. The results show that the consideration of physical features alone is not enough to predict vulnerability in the study area. Seasonal fluctuations in ionic concentrations (e.g. ionic strength, NO3-N and Cl-) and coliform bacteria are observed and result from disperse and rapid recharge events. Multivariate analysis techniques (e.g. principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis) demonstrate that preferential recharge pathways and anthropogenic activities, such as domestic effluents affect the groundwater quality. The data and findings of this study were used to assist in the design of a probabilistic risk assessment model based on the Poisson distribution. This study demonstrates the complexity and the challenges related to bacterial contamination in drilled wells. In spite of these challenges, this analysis was useful as a baseline to assess the impact of anthropogenic activities, and may be used in future studies to assist municipalities in the evaluation and protection of groundwater supplies.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR R/C BUILDING VULNERABILITY INDEX AND MEMBER IMPORTANCE CALCULATION Turkey has many active faults which have the potential to generate large earthquakes. Recent earthquakes showed that the buildings in Turkey are not well designed and vulnerable to earthquakes. Previous studies on the subject showed that many structures in Turkey need to be strengthened before the next major earthquake to minimize property loss and casualties. A number of fast and approximate (mostly empirical) methods have been developed in the past to process large building stock. However, there are some important and special structures that do not fit with the general building stock and needs special consideration (e.g., disaster management center, governmental buildings, hospitals, tall structures, etc.). This study targets to evaluate those important and special structures in a detailed, fast, and correct manner. The developed software, which constitutes an important part of this study, does process the building information several times to determine member-based importance factors. The vulnerability index of the building will be determined using the importance of each load-carrying member and how much each member is forced with respect to its capacity. In order to augment user perception, a functional graphical user-interface is designed. Software is equipped with modules that generate input files for SAP2000 analysis program, conduct dynamic and static analysis automatically, and postprocess the generated analysis results which enable the engineer to make a decision on the vulnerability of the structure. Program is written in C++, using object-oriented programming technique. The main difference between this and similar studies is the generator program which automatically generates 3D-FE models and post-processes nonlinear analysis results for an effective decision mechanism. In this way, more realistic results can be obtained much faster. As future studies, new routines are planned to be implemented to the graphical user interface of the program which will suggest smart and engineered retrofit/strengthening alternatives to the user.

In this study, an alternative seismic vulnerability assessment model is developed. For this purpose, one of the most popular artificial intelligence techniques, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), is used. Many ANN models are generated using 4 different network training functions, 1 to 50 hidden neurons and combination of structural parameters like number of stories, normalized redundancy scores, overhang ratios, soft story indices, normalized total column areas, normalized total wall areas are used to achieve the best assessment performance. Duzce database is used throughout the thesis for training ANN. A neural network simulator is developed in Microsoft Excel using the weights and parameters obtained from the best model created at Duzce damage database studies. Afyon, Erzincan, and Ceyhan databases are simulated using the developed simulator. A recently created database named Zeytinburnu is used for the projection purposes. The building sesimic vulnerability assessment of Zeytinburnu area is conducted on 3043 buildings using the proposed procedure.

The transportation system is an important network established to ensure the mobility of people and goods between destinations. In addition, it also serves a vital role in responding to disasters, and therefore deserves special attention when those disasters threaten to decrease its support capability. The task of securing a transportation system consisting of multiple interconnected assets is a complex responsibility. As an owner and operator of major transportation infrastructure, state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) have a vested interest in ensuring this balance and represent an important mediator between federal and local interests, assuming nine key security planning roles in their traditional transportation planning duties: Coordinator, Analyzer/Planner, Financial Administrator, Infrastructure Owner, Infrastructure Operator, Implementer, Regulator, Information Provider, and Influencer. Through their internal vulnerability assessments, the departments already perform a vital security planning function that can support their own planning efforts as well as others. Incorporating security into the transportation planning process requires modification as feedback of implementation methods is received. It does not mean transforming the DOT into a security agency, but rather incorporating a security perspective into the analysis of the system. This first involves establishing a more solid role as a coordinator in order to solidify vital linkages between agencies relevant to security planning. This interaction should reveal standardization issues the DOT can address in order to ensure effective collaboration, communication and coordination. Funding security measures may be difficult; but by incorporating security measures into initial analyzation and planning processes, they can be brought into the broader concept of the system rather than simply added as additional funding needs. The nine roles suggested earlier offer opportunities for state DOTs to overcome these and other challenges faced in the process of incorporating security into the transportation planning process. Through these roles, state DOTs can ensure that security efforts reach the parts of the system that require them and begin to build a more secure system.