Aliakmonas river and Thessaloniki Water Treatment plant monitoring
THESSALONIKI (GREECE)
The second largest city of Greece with more than 1 million inhabitants in the metropolitan region, Thessaloniki is considered the most important centre of the area.
EYATH SA is currently in the process of developing its Water Safety Plan, in accordance with the EU Legislation Framework regarding Water Quality with a holistic Risk Based approach within the whole water system it manages. This specific project is anticipated to reinforce these efforts towards the direction of deploying an integrated Water Security Plan. During last year, EYATH experienced a variety of unpredictable events from an accidental oil spill at Aliakmonas river to a natural disastrous flooding at the area of one of the main water pumping stations that had affected the water supply quality and finally a severe breakage of the main water transfer pipe from Aravissos, cutting off city’s water supply to half for several days.
These events have gravely challenged the company’s preparedness mechanisms of emergency response to safeguard the water quality and public health of the city. To this direction, the main “step-wise” objective of EYATH S.A. is to develop and implicate its Water Safety Plan while being a part of a wider community of European authorities who can standardize safety and security within the Water Sector.
Actions and expected results
This project will have a high impact on highlighting the best combination of existing online instrumentation to be fine-tuned and to be installed at the most appropriate topography of the water system. In this way, some of the existing barriers at detecting a wider variety of substances would fall by the systemic data standardization and analytics produced on potential contamination events.
The results of this project can provide all the data needed for an integrated risk assessment and an in-depth study to highlight the vulnerabilities of our water system’s safety and security as a whole. There is a high expectation that all the appropriate mitigation measures and actions will be defined (concerning the water resources monitoring methods, the communication procedures amongst the first responders, the information harvesting methods to exploit social media etc). This systematic approach will bring out the general rules and procedures to integrate them into a framework of a solid standardized methodology.
Consequently, a significant improvement in the safety and security of the water supply of the greater metropolitan area of Thessaloniki will take place, taking into consideration both the instrumentation applied and the standardization of all the first response procedures. Under this overall risk-based approach, the already complying water supply of the city will become more resilient to unexpected external threats.
Lead partners
