Context
Water quality deterioration caused by pollution incidents is rapidly
increasing. In the 1980s and 1990s many accidental water pollution events
were identified in the Danube River Basin. A significant number of these
were international, while still others went unreported. In some countries
these accidents on occasion required the shut down of drinking water
intakes, or other precautionary measures to be taken. A clear need was
evident to improve the early information about such events, especially in
case of their transboundary impacts. Countries that lie in the middle and
lower part of the basin are the most at risk from this hazard.
The establishment of the Danube AEWS was
one of the high priority actions of the Environmental Programme for the
Danube River Basin (EPDRB), and was supported by the Governments of the
Danube countries with the financial support of the European Union's Phare
Programme. The EPDRB was launched in 1992. The basic principle of this
Programme is to promote the co-operation and efforts of the Danube
riparian countries in developing measures to overcome environmental
problems of the region, using integrated environmental management
practice.
The set-up of the DAEWS is in accordance
with and builds-on the relevant and adopted multilateral conventions and
declarations concerning the Danube or transboundary rivers: the Convention
on Co-operation for Protection and Sustainable Use of the River Danube
(the provisions on the establishment of communication, warning and alarm
systems are stated in Article 16. of this Convention), the Bucharest
Declaration, and the conventions agreed under the UN/ECE framework.
The Rhine International Alert and Warning
System which has been in operation since many years, as well as the
recently developed system for the Elbe River clearly demonstrated the
requirements for accidental pollution warning systems and provided
practical experiences for the design of the Danube AEWS. The Danube Basin
Alarm Model, as an important tool for the assessment of pollution impacts
has been developed similarly to the Rhine Alarm Model. The establishment of
an independent satellite communication network was selected to serve the
warning system in case of emergencies, to avoid the operational
uncertainties of the existing public telecommunication networks,
especially in the lower part of the basin.
Objectives
The main objectives of the project consist of:
- The establishment of a pro c e d u re of
international co-operation in the Danube River Basin
- The development of a system providing
early information on transboundary river pollution incidents.
The availability of this information
enables the responsible authorities of the countries, affected by the
impacts of such pollution events, to act in time, to protect and assist
sensitive water users. The DAEWS is planned to cover the whole catchment
area of the River Danube, including all of its significant tributaries.
Results
The Danube AEWS started operating in April 1997. The set-up of the system
is based on the principle of one national centre (PIAC) for each of the
Danube countries, having the same responsibility and functionality. There
are at present (January 1998) nine fully equipped PIAC (Germany: Passau,
Austria: Tulln, Czech Republic: Brno, Slovakia: Bratislava, Hungary:
Budapest, Slovenia: Ljubljana, Croatia: Zagreb, Romania: Bucharest,
Bulgaria: Sofia), all in the operational stage. Each PIAC has three Units
to perform the following tasks during emergency periods:
- Communication on a reported sudden
pollution of the Danube river basin waters
- Expert involvement to assess the effects
or impact of the reported accidental pollution
- Decision making on further actions
(local or international warnings) to be taken.
Since April 1997 till October 1998 five
significant water pollution accidents were observed. To increase the
capabilities and readiness of the DAEWS several additional projects are
going on, or are planned to be launched under the EPDRB programme. An
important part of further development is the harmonisation and upgrading
of institutional background supporting DAEWS activities in each of the
co-operating countries.
Technical characteristics
The AEWS system consists of 3 sub-systems: the IPS (Information Processing
System), a Basin-wide satellite communication + alarm network and a
model-system for impact-assessment (DBAM).
The Information Processing System (IPS) manages
the information flow on national level within three units of the PIACs
(Communication Unit, Expert Unit and Decision Making Unit) and on
international level between the different PIACs in the Danube River Basin. The
user-friendly software provides options for each country to use
his home language while the language of international communication is
English.
The objective is to provide a standardised
tool for the PIACs of the DAEWS in the Danube River Basin to ensure fast
management of information flow in case of emergency periods caused by
accidental pollution incidents. The users requirements on the system
consists of a fast running, user-friendly information management system to
be installed on PC's, easy and fast access to the satellite communication
system, and an address-book to contain all responsible professionals,
decision-makers in the system.
The IPS computer program is capable of
displaying all the messages of the international communication (which is
in English) concerning a pollution incident in the language of the country
where the PIAC is located. The IPS can be used for the registration of an
incident, filling out of Standard Forms for international warning within
the DAEWS, transmission of Standard Forms through satellite communication,
registration of necessary addresses of participating Institutes and
professionals, logging and reporting of incident-related events and
actions, general reporting on incidents and for quarterly and annual
reports. For satellite transmission the CAPSAT program (DOS application)
can be invoked within the IPS. The IPS ensures that these activities are
carried out on a standardised and comparable way throughout the whole
river basin and has already been installed for the computer network of
each of the PIAC's (National Centres) of the DAEWS system. The IPS was
developed by Delft Hydraulics in T h e Netherlands, the Consultant
Institute for the AEWS Sub-Group activities.
The hardware configuration consists of an
IBM PC compatible personal computer with at least 80486 processor, 8
Mbytes RAM, 12 MB free memory space, SVGA display or better, 800*600
resolution, 1.44 MB FDD and Microsoft compatible mouse. The required
software configuration is a MS-DOS operating system 5.0 or later,
Microsoft Windows operating system version 3.1 or later.
Danube Basin Alarm Model (DBAM)
is applied in each Expert Unit of the PIACs as a tool for decision
support. The DBAM model-system covers the whole river system (the Danube
and its important tributaries) of the Danube Basin and provides fast
information at selected locations and selected time on the simulated
characteristics of an accidental polluting spill, like travel time,
concentration profile, shape of pollutant plume. The decision-support
model system is used at the PIACs of the basin-wide Danube Accident
Emergency Warning System (DAEWS), to assist the expertise activities on
the assessment of transboundary impacts of accidental water pollution
incidents.
The DBAM software consists of three main
parts: the user interface program, the model simulation programme and the
model result display programme. The model simulation programme was based
on the existing Rhine Alarm model by the permission of the competent
authorities. However it was expanded with modules assessing the lateral
concentration distribution, and with options accounting for specific
structures such as dams, artificial lakes, etc. The development of the
DBAM was carried out by a Consortium led by VITUKI in Hungary with the
co-operation of STU (Bratislava), ICIM (Bucharest), NIMH (Sofia) and RIZA
(The Netherlands) under the Phare Project EU/AR/303/91.The final results
are summarized in four volumes: Data Report , Users’ Manual ,
Theoretical Reference Manual and System Reference. The software is
available on six diskettes.
The hardware configuration consists of an
IBM PC compatible personal computer with at least 80486 processor, 8
Mbytes RAM,80 MB HDD with at least 12 MB free memory space, 1.44 MB FDD
and linear or bus mouse. The required software configuration is MS-DOS
6.20/6.22 or Microsoft Windows 95. To run DBAM under MS-DOS the additional
software of Microsoft Windows 3.10 or 3.11 is needed. The basin-wide
satellite communication and alarm system are used to ensure
basin-wide, fast and reliable communication between Danube countries in
case of emergencies caused by accidental pollution incidents for
transmission of information on incident characteristics.
The satellite-based international
communication network established in the Danube River Basin provides a
fast and reliable possibility for immediate warning, or information
exchange between the PIACs of the DAEWS, when an accidental spill causes a
transboundary emergency situation. The SATCOM Terminals of the Inmarsat-C
system are applied for this purpose in the Danube Basin, the stand-by
system for the communication is telefax through public networks.
The Land Station of this satellite system
is the Burum station in The Netherlands. The SATCOM Terminal through its Dialer
Unit automatically alerts the personnel on duty by connected
pagers, when warning arrives from abroad on the satellite system. Compared
to regular practice, the novelty is that a newly developed software allows
display on the pagers not only the fact of warning, but all the necessary
main data on the reported incident for the first fast orientation of the
personnel on duty.
The hardware configuration consists of an
Inmarsat-C SATCOM terminal connected to IBM PC compatible personal
computer with at least 80486 processor, 8 Mbytes RAM, 12 MB free memory
space, SVGA display or better, 800*600 resolution, 1.44 MB FDD and
Microsoft compatible mouse. The required software is a MS-DOS operating
system 5.0 or later.
The CAPSAT software was developed for DOS
environment, however to run it from the IPS Information Processing System
installed for PIAC operations, the Microsoft Windows operating system
version 3.1 or later is necessary. Easy Call pagers are linked to the
system to provide immediate alert for PIAC personnel on duty.
Transferability
Project outputs such as the IPS, DBAM and the basin-wide satellite
communication and alarm system could be transferred to any other location.
Potential user groups are the water authorities dealing with water
management and pollution control and the water users, looking at specific
water quality requirements such as Waterworks, fish-farms, etc. Common
requirements to both users is that they need early information /warning on
the characteristics of water quality in order to apply the necessary
prevention/control measures for protecting the intakes.
For more information visit http://www.rec.org/REC/Programs/Telematics/Telematics.shtml
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