Rehabilitation of the water supply network of Timişoara City from Timiş County in Romania

Abstract

In such an urban centre like Timisoara (the largest one from the West of Romania), the problem of water treatment for drinking, respectively wastewater collection and treatment, have always been issues of strategic importance to the community. The policies of the European Union to support the financing of the member states in the field of environmental engineering and protection represented the basic pillar in the development of the water supply network also in this case. In light of the increasing and pressing need to efficiently manage scarce water resources, there has been renewed interest by water distribution network owners to develop and implement water management strategies and tools that would assist in the integrated and automated management of those networks. The modernizations made at the treatment plants can be summarized in a few basic ideas: the automatic control of processes, lower costs, and higher safety. The most commonly used rehabilitation techniques for reducing both types of water losses are pressure management and pipeline rehabilitation. In Timişoara City, this modernization, and the rehabilitation of the water supply network led to a significant reduction of the environmental pollution (water, soil, air), and to a better protection of human health. Investments in modern technologies for water treatment, which allow an automatic monitoring of the process, translate into more safety in exploitation, and, implicitly, a better-quality control. The main objectives pursued in this study aim at: improving the quality of drinking water supplied to the population, ensuring continuous supply of drinking water, compliance with the regulations in force, both Romanian and European, and ensuring the access for the majority of the population at this system. There were followed the rehabilitation systems for street drinking water supply networks, also those for street sewerage networks, with modern constructive solutions.