CU Sep-Oct 2023

COMMENT
Editor:
David Chadwick
(cad.user@btc.co.uk)
News Editor:
Mark Lyward
(mark.lyward@btc.co.uk)
Advertising Sales:
Josh Boulton
(josh.boulton@btc.co.uk)
Production Manager:
Abby Penn
(abby.penn@btc.co.uk)
Design/Layout:
Ian Collis
ian.collis@btc.co.uk
Circulation/Subscriptions:
Christina Willis
(christina.willis@btc.co.uk)
Publisher:
John Jageurs
john.jageurs@btc.co.uk
Published by Barrow &
Thompkins Connexion Ltd.
35 Station Square, Petts Wood,
Kent BR5 1LZ
Tel: +44 (0) 1689 616 000
Fax: +44 (0) 1689 82 66 22
SUBSCRIPTIONS:
UK £35/year, £60/two years,
£80/three years;
Europe:
£48/year, £85 two years,
£127/three years;
R.O.W. £62/year
£115/two years, £168/three years.
Single copies can be bought for £8.50
(includes postage & packaging).
Published 6 times a year.
© 2022 Barrow & Thompkins
Connexion Ltd.
All rights reserved.
No part of the magazine may be
reproduced, without prior consent
in writing, from the publisher
For more magazines from BTC, please visit:
www.btc.co.uk
Articles published reflect the opinions of
the authors and are not necessarily those
of the publisher or his employees. While
every reasonable effort is made to ensure
that the contents of editorial and advertising
are accurate, no responsibility can be
accepted by the publisher for errors, misrepresentations
or any resulting effects
Comment
Water, water, everywhere....
by David Chadwick
But not where you want it! It has been
a year of extremes, not all of which
can be attributed to the current
situation in Ukraine, but certainly
exacerbating the fallout from the region.
As a harbinger of the future, the evolving
catastrophic consequences of water
mismanagement are beginning to be felt
on a global basis, from massive droughts
and water shortages in many countries,
the depletion of water reserves in
reservoirs, to unprecedented floods
across the globe.
In an attempt to fathom - no pun intended
- the reasons why a world whose surface is
71% water should start to present itself as
a problem, we need to look at how it is
distributed. Apparently 96.5% of that is salt
water in the oceans, and only 3.5% is
locked up in glaciers, ice caps (mostly at
69%) and freshwater lakes. That's still a lot,
as if you could flatten out the mountains
and melt all the ice, sea levels would rise to
an altitude of 2.7km!
So why are we short of water and why,
when it does rain, it absolutely pours? We
saw the results of persistent drought in
this country with the fields turning brown
and crops withering. I particularly noticed
the absence of cattle and sheep on the
local fields and presumed they were
eating the sileage from last year back on
the farm and depleting their winter rations.
The extremes in this country were mild,
though, compared to the devastation
occurring elsewhere.
In the developed world, the drought and
extreme heat is estimated to have cut
production by around 20%, but due to the
disparity between the extensive
agricultural methods used in the
developed world compared to third world
countries, the impact is thought be less
severe in the latter. It exacerbates,
however, the decline in grain exports from
the Ukrainian bread-basket.
That is now. The future is less certain, but
we do know that rising populations in the
Third World and increasing urbanisation
are going to make the current situation
seem like a summer holiday compared to
the climactic conditions we will face in the
future. Water management is as significant
a factor in managing the Earth's changing
ecosystem as Net Zero Carbon and global
warming, and current measures to
improve its sourcing and control are
merely the thin end of the wedge.
One of the articles in this issue looks at
the use of Bentley's OpenFlows
WaterSight risk mitigation application to
increase the efficiency of water distribution
to households and businesses in given
areas. It uses analytical tools to evaluate,
simulate and control water networks
based on digital twin-based data models.
It could bring up to date the more
traditional methods of management used
by local water authorities in this country.
The supply of water, though, is just one
part of the equation. High temperatures
that normally accompany droughts
evaporate moisture from the soil and
compact it so that subsequent storms
merely run off violently flooding roads,
towns and water courses and invariably
wasted, instead of refreshing the soil and
filling up depleted reservoirs.
There has, naturally, been a great deal of
comment on the drought, and the use of
hosepipe and other bans on water usage
to mitigate its effects. There has been
precious little discussion, however, about
the long-term possibilities of water
shortage due to climate change and the
steps needed to cope with them. Perhaps
it's time for the water companies to stop
counting their bonuses and step up their
plans for real risk mitigation. I would be
delighted to see Bentley's OpenFlows
meet this challenge by extending its
analytics to cover global events.
4 September/October 2022