January 18, 2011, Orense, Spain |

New control centre opened in Orense to control the Miño–Sil catchment area

The Miño–Sil catchment area’s new control centre has now been commissioned to provide permanent surveillance of the status of reservoirs, river levels and volumes and the quality of the area’s masses of water.

The Framework Water Directive has made it compulsory to have control networks in place to provide quantitative and qualitative data on the status of currents. To comply with this European regulation, the Miño–Sil Water Authority oeprates an automatic hydrological information system (AHIS) and an automatic water quality information system (AWQIS). One hundred AHIS stations are distrubuted over several currents in the area, taking readings every five minutes of the river levels, flow rates, rainfall and reservoir data (level, dam inlet and outlet flow rates, among other constantly updated parameters), plus 13 AWQIS stations that report on the chemical and ecological status of the various masses of water to facilitate effective risk prevention.

The data generated by these stations is received via satellite in real time at the Catchment Area Control Centre (CECU), located in Orense, which is operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. These systems enable swift, coordinated action to be taken to minimise the impact of flash floods or droughts, while enhancing responsible management of the catchment area's water resources.

Before this project was launched, the AHIS catchment-area centre was located in Oviedo, jointly managing operations in the Miño–Sil and Cantabria catchment areas. Now that the CECU has been opened in Orense and all the work to partition the two systems has been completed, they are fully independent from one another.

The budget for the project was €1 million. The work was done in 2010.