INFRA STORIES 7. Fighting against flooding in Denmark

The Urbanista

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Stories about places all across Nordics, where infrastructure projects with significant impact for the local communities have been built. Stories about innovative and sustainable solutions.

Fighting against flooding in Roskilde, Denmark

The city of Roskilde in Denmark is probably most famous for its annual music festival. 130,000 visitors enjoying eight days of live music until it inevitably rains, the festival floods and leaves everyone swimming in 80 hectares of mud.

Unfortunately, the coastal areas surrounding the fjord just to the north of Roskilde, are suffering from a much more serious type of flooding. Residents in Jyllinge Nordmark are painfully aware of this: far too many of them have been left standing in water up to their waist when the fjord and local streams flood their homes. Sadly, this has happened several times over the past decade, resulting in flooded basements and costly damage. Basically, the future will see an increasing demand for reliable stormwater solutions.

One of these coastal protection initiatives was a large new pumping plant supplied by Sulzer, a specialist in fluid engineering and pumping technologies for fluids. The plant was designed to send excess water from the River Værebro back into the fjord when the river breaks its banks.

Kenneth Larsen, Technical Manager at Sulzer described the situation. “A system of this kind must not go wrong. When we put our solution out to tender, we specified that the structure had to be made of polyethylene plastic to withstand chemical influence from the very salty water passing through the system. The plant pumps were installed in a custom-made Wehopanel structure of polyethylene plastic delivered by Uponor Infra, which could withstand the water and has a design life of over 100 years.

The highly durable Wehopanels developed by Uponor Infra can be dimensioned and equipped individually for countless applications, such as tanks, support structures, pumping station buildings and floating or submerged marine structures. In recent years, many innovative new products and structures have been developed using Wehopanel.

Thank you Urbanistas for listening our stories!

The Urbanista is a production of Uponor Infra Oy, produced and edited in sunny Helsinki by Mariia Andriushenkova.