Pressure Standards in Water Distribution Systems: Reflection on Current Practice with Consideration of Some Unresolved Issues

Pressure standards assist in the design of water distribution systems and the assessment of their performance. Although exact thresholds are sometimes rather vague, unusually high and low pressures are widely understood to increase costs and put systems at risk from events like pipe bursts at the high-pressure end to the risk of contaminant intrusion or poor firefighting conditions at the low-pressure end. Interestingly, because the definition …