Serious efforts made for water security
Serious efforts made for water security
The following are abstracts from two keynote speeches made at the Seoul International Symposium on Waterworks 2011 which opened for a two-day session at the headquarters of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry. ― ED.
Trends in securing safe water
By Bruno Nguyen
Director of Operations, Eau de Paris, 9 rue Victor Schoelcher
Water consumers all around the world have in common their wish to have access to a resilient water supply of good quality and enough quantity.
In order to satisfy their customers and secure their mission, the water utilities have to think about effective and affordable countermeasures to set up in the case of possible degradation of the service.
The costs related to the low levels of service for water are not only response costs and sanitary costs, but also social costs and ultimately political costs.
Incentives for better preparation against low risks but high effects are often external to the water utility. Among these incentives is the awareness of the population to the risks.
The last decade has seen both natural catastrophes and terrorist attacks, and has seen peaks of concern with brutal deterioration of the service thereafter.
The new technologies are providing new possibilities, while standardization will help utilities and policy makers to level up the resiliency of their system accordingly to appropriate positions.
The general trend, if only one has to be remembered, would be that water supply security and safety is becoming one side of the resiliency of urban centres.
Development plans for water security
By David E J Garman
Former IWA President; Dean and Professor, School of Freshwater Science, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
The limitations of existing monitoring processes in water supply systems showed up in the late part of the 20th century as a potential major risk to human health (Bartram 2001).
A proposal to initiate a hazard control procedure to assess and preserve water quality in drinking water supply and distribution systems previously trialed and introduced in Australia was adopted to overcome these disadvantages.
This process was incorporated into the procedure known as Water Safety Plans (WSPs). This was formally adopted internationally by WHO and IWA in 2001 (WHO 2003) and has been updated subsequently in the latest version of the WHO Drinking Water Guidelines (WHO 2011).
This process is not just another water monitoring program. It represents a coherent safety plan that encompasses a culture change and when properly and fully implemented a significant reduction in cost and risk for the operators and consumers. Examples of these are being made public and how these have benefitted water supply operators world-wide.
There have been recent developments in surveillance ― a key component of WSPs that change the perception of risk and will new challenges for water supply operators for the next phase of WSPs.