GENERAL VIEW ON WATER SECTOR IN ROMANIA

Water Resources of Romania

Water resources and their allocation

The Romanian water resources are relatively reduced and ununiformly distributed in time and space, being constituted of ground waters as intern rivers, artificial and natural lakes, the Danube River and underground waters, as it follows:

The Black Sea water resources, although very important, could not be tacked in consideration because of technical and economical difficulties of the sea water desalinisation.

The intern rivers and lakes represents a theoretical potential of appreciatively 42 billion mc in an average year (with a multiyear flow of 1300 m3/year). Reference to the intern rivers, the specifically resource is 1700mc/inhabitant and year, a relatively reduced value comparavely with the resources of the other European countries.

Those technical utilizable resources cannot be used without the achievement of some important investments in complex arrangement works of the hydrographical basins and in wastewater treatment installations, because: 1974 most important water resource, the Danube River, could be used only in a small size, because of his eccentrically position, at the south boundary of the territory:

The quality of the water resources

The monitoring of the water quality in Romania it was initiated in 1954, but it is started systematic the middle of 70’s when it were elaborated first specific methodological aspects of this domain.

Concerning ground waters, the monitoring system is organised for watching the quality of the rivers water on a length of approximately 20 000 km , from the 75 000 km with daily analyses in about 60 control sections, located , generally, downstream of the great polluters and with periodical analysis in other 240 sections. For underground waters, the monitoring system developing process is started in 1984 and it was structured in two subsystems:

The “Romanian Waters” S.A. National Company .has the responsibility of the maintaining in function of the water quality monitoring.

The quality of the natural ground water resources is influenced by their present usage.

The discharge in the natural receivers (especially from the great industrial platforms) of the untreated or insufficient treated waste waters from the industrial platforms determine a length of the degraded streams, which cannot be used for other purposes without big treatment costs, which overseas 3700 km, on the base of the STAS 4706/1988, and those which are from the second and third category of quality, which cannot be used as water supply sources to be over 7.500 km.

Concerning the Danube River, highly water flows ensure a such dilution of the received waste waters, thus the overall water quality belong to the first and the second quality classes. In some conditions, the water supply of the riparian towns (Tr. Severin, Oltenita, Calarasi, Cernavoda, etc.), it’s still affected, the treated water exceeding the drinking limits for some of the indicators ( ammonium, organic substances content, etc ).

Concerning underground water quality, the comparative analysis of his dynamic underlined an accentuation of the depreciation of those resources, as special extension of the affected areas and as the manifestation intensity of the main characteristics and polluted areas. As a consequence it comes out that impossibility of their direct utilisation as drinking water, being necessary adequate treatment measures.

The main causes of the global deterioration of the water resources quality could be synthesised as:

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