Hydraulic works and monitoring: retention basins increase the safety of the urban area of Pescara

The Pescara River is 170 km long, is fed by the largest river basin in the Abruzzo Region and over the years has suffered considerable anthropogenic pressure with the reduction of spaces useful for defence against hydraulic and hydro-geological risk. For this reason, the areas surrounding Pescara are sensitive to the effects of flooding, just remember the great flood of 1992, but also the most recent floods of December 2013 and May 2023. The memory of these catastrophic events must not be an end in itself, but must be an engine to bring to usefulness what experience has unfortunately taught, and that is what has been done. The Region, which took the first steps for this important work already in 2015, is today engaged in the completion of the most ambitious hydraulic defence project ever carried out in Abruzzo, which has seen the creation of 5 retention tanks, capable of containing 5 million cubic meters of water.

The intervention, according to the designers, will reduce the areas subject to flooding by 40% and, in terms of socio-economic effects, the estimate of potential damage from flooding is reduced by €211,000,000 (-57%).

In this context, CAE, at the service of the RTI formed by Angelo De Cesaris S.p.A, ALMA C.I.S S.r.l. and Colanzi S.r.l. that is carrying out the works, will be responsible for providing, installing and activating systems for the monitoring of retention works, of the Pescara River and its supply basin, more specifically:

- 6 thermal-hydro-rain gauge stations for monitoring the climatic characteristics of the river basin;

- 4 stations for hydrometric and flow rate monitoring, for the definition of the hydrological regime of the Pescara River and the Nora Stream;

- upgrade of 2 existing hydrometric stations.

Both the new stations offered and those subject to updating will be equipped with Compact dataloggers, specially designed for monitoring and alerting in multi-risk contexts, to which several meteorological and hydrological  sensors will be connected and which will interface with the remote control system of the gates, in order to obtain an integrated management mechanism of the regulation bodies on the basis of the regulation logics.

All the data produced by the new systems at the retention works, at the monitoring points along the Pescara River and at the feed basins, can be viewed and managed directly from the new local control centre at the hydraulic control building of the retention works (Surveillance House) and can also be visible at the headquarters of the Functional Centre of the Civil Protection Agency of the Abruzzo Region.

Once one or more alert thresholds have been defined, the system will be able to send alert messages to a specially created addresses, even in the event of component malfunctions, according to which the so-called "Operational Protocol for filling of the retention tanks" will be activated.

With all this information available, the operator can intervene by remotely operating one or more gates of the total of 34 gates present in the plant, using devices for remote control of the gates at the 5 retention tanks and at the respective deviation and recovery works, also provided by CAE to the RTI formed by Angelo De Cesaris S.p.A, ALMA C.I.Sr.l and Colanzi S.r.l that is carrying out the works.

The project also provides for the supply of fundamental services, in particular:

- maintenance;

- section survey activities;

- discharge measurements;

- modelling for the recovery of the flow rate variable and the calculation of the outflow scale.

This ambitious project will be fundamental for the hydraulic defence of the Pescara territories and once again demonstrates the importance of integrating monitoring with structural interventions for flood risk mitigation.


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