Romania has its own ‘Delft designed’ field lab for testing and developing innovations that can protect the country against the effects of climate change.

Flood Proof Romania was officially opened in the presence of the Romanian director-general Olimpia Negru (Ministry of Water & Forestry) and Marjan Kreijns, programme manager of VP delta (TU Delt, the Netherlands) on 15 June. Local partners are Technical University of Civil Engineering in Bucharest and National Agency Romanian Water (ANAR).

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Bas Reedijk introduces the lightweight BoxBarrier at Flood Proof Romania
Bas Reedijk introduces the lightweight BoxBarrier (yellow box in the back) that can be filled with water once on location and functions as a flood defence (photo: Bas Poelman/FTM flood management).
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Bas Reedijk introduces the lightweight BoxBarrier at Flood Proof Romania
Bas Reedijk introduces the lightweight BoxBarrier (yellow box in the back) that can be filled with water once on location and functions as a flood defence (photo: Bas Poelman/FTM flood management).

Expanded version

Flood Proof Romania is a copy of Flood Proof Holland, the testing ground for temporary flood defences on the TU Delft Campus. The Romanian variant is an expanded version: the basins are larger, steeper and deeper, which makes other types of tests possible. Therefore, both field labs will work closely together in the area of research and innovation in the coming five years.

Several visits to Delft

"Our Romanian partners have visited Flood Proof Holland a number of times in recent years", says Kreijns about the realisation of the project. Romania has large rivers, including the Danube, and many floods. This year the country already suffered from one.

Kreijns: "It is of course a great honour that our field lab from Delft has now been recreated in Romania. It shows once again that this topic is becoming increasingly urgent and important and that there is a greater need for research in the field of water management, innovations and the use of testing grounds". 

At the opening of Flood Proof Romania, four Dutch companies showed their mobile flood barrier systems BoxBarrier, Tubebarrier, Green Soil Bag and Slurpzak.

This news item was originally published on the website of Delft University of Technology