REMOTE WATER LEVEL RECORDING IN THE RESERVOIRS

 Filenews 26 October 2020 - by  Lucas Parpas

The Department of Water Development, which is responsible for the obligation to monitor dams on a daily basis and to record the fluctuation of water supplies, proceeds to implement a new method of measuring water, without having to send officials to the dams every day.

As revealed by the director of the TAH Charalambos Hatzipakkos, with the new water counting system in the dams, savings of workers, fuel, damage to the vehicles of the department, etc. will be achieved.

As he says, he has promoted the use of modern technology so that remotely the TD can access the dams and thus know the exact amount of water found in them. Today, as he explains, for the measurement of water, a TD employee goes daily to the dams and records the data there concerning the quantity of water.

With the automatic meters that will be placed in the dams, in addition to the rainfall and other meteorological data collected, the evaporation of water from them will be recorded and all relevant information will be sent automatically to the headquarters of the TY in Nicosia. The system will be placed in most of the dams, but not at all, because as Charalambos Hatzipakkos points out, this is not possible. The first system is expected to be placed in the dam of Dipotamos, as a pilot.

It is worth noting that this system is already implemented by other countries and the cost of buying it from abroad is around €10,000, while with the decision as it is manufactured by the TAX, the cost automatically fell below €1,000.

In addition to promoting the new water measurement system, the TD also studied various ways to reduce evaporation from dams, but due to the large area occupied by the dams, it was considered that this was impractical, practically impossible.

However, the whole effort to remotely measure the quantities of water found in the dams is made in cooperation with the Department of Meteorological Review in which the relevant information will be channelled.

It is worth noting, however, that last Friday, in all the dams of the free areas, there were stored 225,127 million cubic meters of water, i.e. the occupancy was 77.4% while in the corresponding period last year, in the same dams, there were 232,912 million cubic meters of water and their fullness was 80.1%. In the only dam that is currently recorded water flow, it is in that of Arminou, but the flow barely reaches 4 thousand cubic meters of water around the clock while the total flow from 1 October 2020 until last Friday was 94 thousand cubic meters of water.