Risikostyring i vandforsyningen

Drinking water in Denmark is distributed with only few or no hygienic barriers between catchment and consumer, and it is therefore essential to monitor the drinking water quality. Traditionally, drinking water monitoring has been performed as a control of the delivered water quality rather than as a risk management, allowing to react timely on quality changes to prevent distribution of a deteriorated water quality. ‘From risk monitoring to risk management – risk assessment in water supply’ is a 3-year (2011-2013) innovation project under the strategic partnership ‘Water in Urban Areas’ (www.vandibyer.dk) carried out by the knowledge institutions DTU Environment, DHI, the water utilities Copenhagen Energy, Aarhus Water, VCS Denmark and the public authorities Odense municipality and the Danish Nature Agency.

The purpose of the project is to develop and implement risk management as a part of the climate adaptation measures in the water supply. The risk management will be based on the development of a new and improved monitoring strategy from catchment to consumer - taking into consideration the possibilities and limitations of analytical methods and sensors - and the development and implementation of advanced quantitative risk analysis and management systems.

The project work includes: a) Identification of focus areas based on experiences gathered from contamination cases in the involved water supplies; b) Identification of additional demand for management systems for monitoring based on experiences from the processes of implementing Water Safety Plans; c) Development of a new monitoring strategy; d) Development of quantitative risk assessment in water supply; e) Development of strategies for implementing extra hygienic barriers e.g.

UV; f) Development of new software to cover identified demands for monitoring and management; g) Implementing and evaluating developed tools in demonstration projects, hereby ensuring further dissemination. The first part of the project has been a knowledge gathering based on the water utilities experiences from implementation of Water Safety Plans and from contamination cases.

The knowledge gathering will be used to define monitoring strategies for the three scenarios a) the normal situation; b) a contamination situation; c) source tracking situation.