MANAGING THE THREATS-APPROACHES, EXAMPLES AND SOLUTIONS FROM GERMAN WATER SUPPLY

摘要

Concerns regarding security in water supply have been addressed after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and following natural disasters in various places of the world. The yearly geo hazards report accounts for 820 natural catastrophes in 2011, with 50 major and 5 great natural catastrophes.1 Dominating natural threats for water infrastructure are seismic, meteorological, climatological and hydrological events, summarising storms, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, heat waves, droughts, earthquakes and tsunamis. The vulnerability of large-scale infrastructure to man-made or natural threats is widely recognised. The German Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) strategy addresses three categories of threats to infrastructure: in addition to "natural events" and "terrorism/crime/war", "technical failure/human error" is regarded as the third category of relevant threats. The national CIP strategy defines critical infrastructures as "organisational and physical structures and facilities of such vital importance to a nation's society and economy that their failure or degradation would result in sustained supply shortages, significant disruption of public safety and security, or other dramatic consequences". Water supply is classified among power supply, information and communication technology, transportation and sewage disposal as one of these "basic technical infrastructures" of vital importance. This is much in line with the perception in other countries worldwide,3 cf. also4 for Switzerland or5 for The Netherlands. As a consequence, risk management of water supply systems has received considerable attention at all levels of government and at the water industry itself. The objective of this article is to provide an overview on the efforts, examples and solutions in the protection strategy of German water supply. Thus, the article is divided in four sections, namely the concepts for infrastructure security on the national level (section 2), the bridging function of the water associations from government to water utilities (section 3), and the strategies and measures of the water utilities to secure water safety and water security in terms of organisational and operational issues (section 4).