Abstract
Protection of water resources plays an important role in providing safe and reliable drinking water for people and industry. Drinking water resource protection usually comprises active and passive measures. Passive measures, consisting of different protection zones surrounding the recharge area of the drinking water abstraction point, are the most important and most widely used measures. In the paper is illustrated how the protection of drinking water is implemented through the Water Framework Directive. Protection zones are defined based on the classification of drinking water resource types. They are divided into two groups; groundwater and surface water bodies. All of them are further divided into subgroups; groundwater into intergranular, karstic and fissured aquifers; surface water into stagnant and flowing water bodies. For all drinking water resources three protection zones are defined: inner, middle and outer zone. The outer zone was defined as the total recharge zone of the water quantities abstracted. Inside of inner zone, abstraction point zone is defined, which is protected from unauthorized access. Protection zones for intergranular aquifers are determined according to the isochrones based on travel times. Karstic aquifers are protected on the basis of intervention times and the level of the recharge zone karstification. Fissured aquifers are protected according to groundwater flow velocities; if the flow is laminar, the method of intergranular aquifers is used, otherwise the method of karstic aquifer is implemented. For surface water protection zones limitation method of distances, method of isochrones and dilution and method of intervention times are used.
Highlights
Protection of water resources plays an important role in providing safe and reliable drinking water for people and industry
Together with prohibited or unconditionally allowed activities some conditionally allowable activities were defined. They can only be implemented on the area of drinking water protection zone when no impact on drinking water resource has been found by risk analysis
Safe and reliable drinking water presents a firm basis for healthy everyday life
Summary
Protection of water resources plays an important role in providing safe and reliable drinking water for people and industry. The inner protection zone of karstic aquifers is defined as the area where possible pollutant travels from the injection point to the abstraction zone less 12 hours. With this zone all fissures, known channels, swallow holes, poljes and other karstified regions with direct connection to the source are included. Due to the fast spreading velocity of the pollution available intervention times are shorter than in the case of aquifer pollution This is the reason why the definition of surface water protection zones is more complicated and less agreement can be found in the practice on the method for their determination. For those resources protection zone delineation criteria are combined in a similar way as the combination of criteria for groundwater and surface water
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
