Petre-Vlad TARANU, University of Bucharest, Faculty of Geography, Romania
Gilort River is a second-order tributary of the Danube River, in the Southwestern Romania. Its watershed extends on 1365 km2 between the Carpathians and the Getic Piedmont. The average multiannual liquid discharge is about 8-10 m3/s.
This study aims to assess the relationship between the floods and structural measures in the Novaci-Targu Carbunesti 30 km length reach, located in the upper-middle sector of Gilort river basin.
The torrential nature of the rainfall that fell in July 2005 generated one of the strongest flood events in recent decades in Romania. In Gilort River Basin, the peak discharge of 311 m3/s and the concentration of high discharge values, of over 200 m3/s, in a couple of days (July 12-13) led to the propagation of a large volume of water that eventually overflowed the riverbanks in a short amount of time. The magnitude of the flood from July 2005 and its impact highlighted the vulnerability of human settlements to hydrological hazards, a decisive moment for revising the flood control methods. In the following years, Romania's entry into the EU brought the need of designing basin and flood risk management plans in compliance with the Flood and Water Directives. Among others, the structural measures included in the Jiu River Basin Management Plan also refer to the damming and regularization of the Gilort River, on the segment between Novaci town and Pociovalistea village, an area with heavily eroded and active banks, close to the first house-alignment or other constructions of national interest. These hydrotechnical arrangements are all the more important as, following the statistical analysis based on the 60 years series of maximum annual discharges, a probability of such a flood is about 20%. All these considered and given the onset of hydromorphological imbalance of the channel following the implementation of enhanced structural measures in the last decade, Gilort River's resilience to flood defense is still under question.
Mots clés : floods|Gilort River|River Basin Management Plan|Romania|structural measures
A105050PT