Case: ITOXcontrol safeguards intake Romanian drinking water

The Romanian water supply company Apavital has installed a monitoring station to safeguard the intake of water from the river Prut. The monitoring station is part of an integrated monitoring that signals sudden changes in the water quality of the rivers, enabling Apavital to take appropriate measures, in the worst case a stop of the intake. The iTOXcontrol is developed by the Dutch company microLAN that has installed almost 100 stations worldwide, safeguarding the water supply in cities such as Amsterdam, Washington, Paris, London, Shanghai and Beijing.

“The station in Romania is very special to us”, explains managing director Joep Appels of microLAN. “The monitoring system as a whole has been described in detail and Apavital has developed a protocol with follow-up actions and management procedures. If our bio-monitoring instrument gives an alarm their personnel knows exactly how to handle.” Appels is very pleased with the Romanian drinking water company as a new client. “Most of our clients, either water supply companies or industrial water users, operate the iTOXcontrol as a standalone station and have not fully integrated all their water quality data in one monitoring system”, explains Appels. More Toxicity, Less Light from Bacteria microLAN developed the iTOXcontrol bio-monitor all by itself. The fi rst system was delivered in 2006, and six years ago it was the fi rst bio-monitoring station that
collected its data on-line.

The iTOXcontrol detects the acute toxicity of surface water 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. It uses freshly prepared Vibrio fi scheribacteria directly from a luminescent culture. In contact with the surface water the bacteria produce less light as the toxicity increases. The light production is measured with a photomultiplier.

Early Warning Allows Immediate Response

The iTOXcontrol is a unique system for online monitoring of the toxicity of waste, surface, drinking or process water. It is an early warning system to signal sudden peak values of chemical and other toxic pollutions, like heavy metals, within 15 minutes. In any event or breakdown it is possible to act within minutes, compared to routinely measured parameters that take hours or sometimes days to signal sudden changes in the water quality. Due to the fast warning by iTOXcontrol, it is possible to limit potential damage or narrow the pollution down to a small section of the drink water distribution network.