This article presents a novel response methodology for the operational recovery of a drinking water network after an incident causes an interruption of service. The proposed optimization-based methodology allows computing the optimal set of interventions to be performed in order to mitigate, or even prevent, the impact of the incident on the network operation. Besides, a proof-of-concept scheme has been designed for the automatic generation of failure scenarios and the systematic implementation and validation of the proposed response methodology. Several results are presented to demonstrate the capability of the methodology to mitigate harmful incidents, as well as the performance improvements derived from the application of the obtained interventions.