The Istres Ouest Provence area of the Métropole d’Aix Marseille Provence, consists of 6 towns with a total population of around 99,100. These municipalities have Independent water supply systems (no internal interconnections). All of the communes except Cornillon-Confoux have
their own resources and associated production stations, which draw water from the Crau aquifer.
The ultimate aim of the Istres Ouest Provence CT SDAEP is to draw up a prioritised and costed programme of actions to be carried out in the short,
medium and long term to meet future needs and ensure effective and rational management of resources and infrastructures.
The completion of the SDAEP should make it possible to :
- Estimate current and future drinking water requirements over a 30-year period,
- Analyse the operation of existing infrastructures and identify their strengths and weaknesses in relation to the current situation
and future needs over different timeframes, - Produce a summary of the status of currently exploited water resources and those that could be explored,
- Identify future challenges in terms of securing and diversifying the drinking water supply,
- Identify achievable water savings to preserve water resources and improve and maintain good hydraulic performance.
- Define an action programme consistent with the region’s investment policy.
Securing and diversifying water resources
At present, the 6 towns each benefit from a single resource and there is no solution for securing supplies between them. Securing their supplies is therefore a major challenge for the master plan. The SDAEP will have to identify, for each of the towns in the Istres Ouest Provence area, solutions for securing the water supply (new resources and/or interconnections), enabling the following requirement to be met: each subscriber must have access to drinking water from a main resource which can be replaced by an independent back-up resource (different origin of water) in the event of failure of the first (pollution and/ or breakdown).