Water is the most essential component for sustaining lives of humans and
other living creatures. Supplying potable water with adequate residual pressure is a
fundamental responsibility of city administration, which they do during normal conditions.
But sometimes, abnormal conditions are formed resulting pressure deficient conditions
during the daily operations of water distribution networks. These are caused due to
common occurrences such as pump failure, pipe bursts, and isolation of major pipes from
the system for planned maintenance work and excessive firefighting demands. Total water
stop conditions may arise, when the major source supplying water to the city fails in natural
disaster such as floods, Tsunami, earthquake or manmade disaster such as terrorist attack.
Unlike the pipe failure, longer time is required for restoring water in case of source failure
condition. In such situations, the quantity of water is generally decreased and the water
distribution systems (WDS) may not be able to satisfy all consumers’ demands. In this
context, the assumption that all demands are fully satisfied regardless of the pressure in the
system becomes unreasonable. A realistic behavior of the network performance can only be
attained by considering demands to be pressure dependent. This paper aims to describe how
pressure dependent demand analysis is useful for the simulation of disaster scenario due to
source failure of the Shirpur town. The simulation of failure scenario is carried out using
WaterGEMs software. The paper also aims to prepare the action plans for the recovery of
water supply in such crisis conditions.