Danube Accident Emergency Warning System (AEWS)

Keywords:Water Quality and emergency
Application site: Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine
Website: http://www.ceit.sk/wwwisis/danis
E-mail: pintergyorgy@vituki.hu

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 e f fo rts 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 c o nventions 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 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:

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 D a nube 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 p rogramme 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 Dialler 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. EasyCall 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.

 
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