Delta Life 12

4 DELTARES DELTARES IN BRIEF THIS IS HOWVALLE DEL CAUCA DISTRIBUTES ITS WATER SUPPLY The Valle del Cauca is Colombia's third largest economy. Sugar cane is a particularly important source of income but it is also a crop that requires a lot of water. Local water management is in the hands of a government organisation, the Regional Autonomous Corporation of Valle del Cauca (CVC), which has all the information about water resources but which housed that information in a single location only recently. That was made possible by a subsidy from Partners for Water and an investment from CVC, Deltares, Hydrologic, Futurewater and the Dutch Water Authorities. Dashboards have recently been introduced with indicators that can be used to regulate the various water challenges better and more transparently. The system – HERMANA – uses the Deltares hydrological forecasting system Delft-FEWS (Flood Early Warning). EXTREMELY HIGH WATER STRESS FOR A QUARTER OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION The World Resource Institute came to an alarming conclusion based on the new version of the Aqueduct tool, their water risk atlas: seventeen countries, about a quarter of the world's population, have extremely high levels of water stress. 'In particular, the groundwater stocks in countries such as the United States, India, China, Egypt and various Arab countries are being drastically depleted,' explains Marta Faneca Sanchez of Deltares. 'Stocks are also falling rapidly in mega-cities such as Chennai in India and Mexico City.' The Aqueduct tool maps out the status of global water resources and helps businesses, government authorities and investors to analyse and identify water risks. The knowledge and data in this tool were developed in close collaboration between Delft University of Technology, Utrecht University, Institute of Environmental Studies (IVM), the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), RepRisk and Deltares. D eltares is working on a new test facility on its campus: the GeoCentrifuge. This centrifuge can test structures such as dikes, roads and engineering structures at scale in extreme conditions before they are built. What makes this facility so special is that gravitational forces are used for the testing. Rotating the centrifuge generates forces up to 150 times the force of gravity, which allows us to 'speed up time'. If you want to work with scale models consisting of soil, the only way to make the model accurate is to use stronger gravitational forces. Testing with the GeoCentrifuge cuts costs and reduces risks related to construction and flood risk management. Work has now started on the construction of the GeoCentrifuge and the first tests have already been scheduled. After the summer of 2020, Deltares will start a study of the pile foundations of buildings and other structures. This is expected to produce savings of ten to twenty percent in the costs of foundations. DELTARES BUILDS NEWGEOCENTRIFUGE