Undersigning the Memorandum of Understanding between Yangtze Committee and OVF
We welcomed special guests at OVF (General Directorate of Water Management of Hungary) in April. The delegation of the so-called “Yangtze Committee” lead by their Director visited us. The name is a bit misleading, because in reality, it covers the institute being responsible for the water management of Yangtze River, its Hungarian obverse would be a water directorate.
Their activities are quite similar to our local organizations’ tasks. In fact, the similarity ends at this point. However, it has been proven again that China is the country of egregious numbers. The Yangtze Committee employs 27,000 people (the total number of the Hungarian water management sector is 4,800 people). The total length of Yangtze River is ~6,300 km (the Danube River is 2,857 km) and with this, Yangtze is the third longest river in the World. 490,000,000 people live on its river basin. Its average discharge is ~35,000 m3/s (it is about 3 and half times more than the largest discharge of the Danube). Its largest discharge is 110,000 m3/s (the Danube’s is 11,000). On the river basin of Yangtze, – similar to the Hungarian water management challenges – they have to fight with extreme floods, but with the lack of water that also appears in their tasks to be solved. One of its dams can hold back 25,000 km3 water (volume of the Hungarian lake called Balaton is ~1.9 km3), which lessens the discharge of the Yangtze by 23,000 km3/s during floods.
Of course, we could not present this size of structures to our guests but the beauty and the clear water of Lake Balaton and Budapest’s panorama impressed them by cruising along the Danube
During their visit, the representative of Yangtze Committee and the OVF undersigned a Memorandum of Understanding, which enable to exchange our experiences on a wide scale in the future.
In spite of the fact that we work on different sized river basins, we can give over the well-used Hungarian solutions related to water quality, groundwater management and flood protection.