ETT took part in the project GEREMIA – GEstione dei REflui per il MIglioramento delle acque portuali (GEREMIA – Managing Waste to Improve the Port Waters ) which aims to train and support port water managers with practical and innovative tools and solutions.
On a practical level, it translates into the implementation of a set of governance tools designed to prevent and contain pollution, improve water quality in the port area and develop innovative systems for assessing the quality of port water in the cross-border Italy-France area. Funded within the framework of the 2nd Notice of the Italy-France Maritime Cross-border Cooperation Programme 2014-2020, the project enables the management of pollution risk on a cross-border basis, in particular in the Italy-France area, with a joint port water quality management plan, designed to reduce the risk of sewage pollution and its possible impacts on the surrounding marine environments. The actions implemented as part of the GEREMIA project involve monitoring the port waters by
sampling and analysing different matrices (sediment, water, mussels and fish), modelling effluent dynamics and pollutant dispersion, installing effluent containment systems and defining an integrated index characterising the health of the port marine environment.
The DSS
The management strategy must therefore be able to deal effectively with an extremely dynamic system, which is why GEREMIA uses a Decision Support System (DSS) created based on the requirements of the ports, the knowledge acquired from monitoring and simulation models. The DSS makes the implementation of action plans on the different intervention levels effective as it provides operational support to those who have to make strategic decisions. The DSS makes effective use of all the resources and the large amount of data available (combined information gathered as a result of water, sediment and biota monitoring campaigns, and risk mapping, as well as from the results of numerical simulations for predicting the dynamics of pollutant dispersion within port waters) in the different port scenarios within our territories. ETT was therefore responsible for the development, delivery, maintenance and training of the Decision Support System. In particular, the design and implementation of the system in a tri-lingual version (Italian, English and French) was followed by a testing and debugging phase that led to the deployment of the DSS, thanks also to the collaboration forged with the staff of the Department of Civil, Chemical and Environmental Engineering (DICCA) of the University of Genoa. Subsequently, a functional multimedia system user guide was produced, as well as a support and maintenance service that ETT will maintain for 12 months after testing. From the final delivery date of the DSS, ETT will also manage the hosting service for 5 years. Four demos were set up for the project, one in Toulon, one in Genoa, one in La Spezia and one in Olbia. For each of these, a vast amount of information was collected during the monitoring campaigns and numerical simulations were carried out to predict the dynamics of pollutant dispersion in port waters. Both standard and innovative waste containment and bioremediation (environmental remediation) systems were installed during these pilot actions. The information from the monitoring campaigns is also used to implement modelling tools and allows information on weather forecasts, dispersion, water quality to be displayed in real time.