Scheme for making the drinking water supply safe in the south-east part of the Allier department and communities adjacent to the Loire department.

The Allier Joint Water Authority ("SMEA") was founded in 1992. Further to two interconnection master plans in 1990 and 1997, various investments were made to make the Primary Authorities and the department districts, which are members of the SMEA, safe.
As an option for the east sector of the department, these two water supply systems included a project for building a dam over the Barbenan stream, an affluent of the Besbre, to store drinking water. The reason for this is that several periods of drought, the most recent being in 2003, have revived the need to strengthen water resources in the south-east sector of the department and the area bordering on the Loire department.
This dam project dates from 1953. It was originally designed to supply drinking water to the Besbre Valley Authority in its initial configuration including a large part of the Bourbon Mountain districts, i.e. about 40,000 inhabitants.
Later, the project was reduced to supply only 16 districts (9000 inhabitants). It was also supposed to serve as a relay for supplying other water authorities in emergencies.
In the Loire department, the drinking water master plan designed in 1999/2000 by the General Council also included the possibility of providing an extra supply of water to communities close to the Allier by possibly building a dam on the Barbenan.

Drinking Water Security for the Toulouse Area.

Full Project Management Assignment for building an emergency water supply network for the four main drinking water supply plants in the Toulouse area. The infrastructure necessary for an overall flow of 3.5 m3/s is two intakes in the Ariège and Garonne rivers, 2,500 m of piping of diameter 1500, working as a siphon, one pumping station and 7km of pumped-water piping of diameter between 350 and 1200, crossing the Garonne in 3 places.

Modelling the Water Supply Network for Quimper.

The purpose of the study was to determine the main developments to 2010 so as to be able to cope with the development of consumption and the different risks likely to affect water production, storage and distribution (failure scenarios). The means implemented included an analysis of the potential of various resources, assessing town planning prospects, characterising present and future consumption, carrying out a measurement campaign (level of reservoirs, pressure, flow) and mathematically modelling the networks.

"Towards a global vision"
Guy DUTRIEZ

"The Toulouse area comprises about 60 districts and 700,000 inhabitants. This means that much is at stake when managing the drinking water supply for an entity of that size and many challenges and decision-making authorities are involved: municipal and departmental authorities, joint district authorities, concessionaires, etc.
Within this complex situation, the Project Manager is the key person to whom each Owner/Client endeavours to formulate its own safety and production requirements. His priority role is therefore to ensure that the coherence of the whole is assured.

The assignment, entrusted to BCEOM by the Adour-Garonne Water Authority, for which I was responsible, involved carrying out a detailed survey of these players to try to understand them, establish their real needs, identify superfluous structures, envisage potential inter-links and determine the true development priorities in keeping with the scale of the agglomeration.
I think that the success of this project, apart from drawing up a Water Supply Master Plan for the Toulouse area, is greatly dependent on the quality of the expert appraisal and preliminary survey. As the person responsible for this study, what could be more gratifying than to produce the operational information which will allow future projects to be fully coherent?"