Hidrológiai Közlöny, 2016 (96. évfolyam)
2016 / 3. szám - HISTORICAL SNAPSHOT - Papp Mária - Ritvayné Szomolányi Mária - Szalay Miklós - Nagy-Kovács Zsuzsanna Ágnes: Water supply in Hungary
Mária Papp et al: Water Supply in Hungary 19 It is the task of water management to assist adaptation with 21st century tools, mitigating the harmful effects of extreme phenomena, while providing society with the indispensable water evenly distributed in space and time, when and where necessary. THE DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC WATER SUPPLY IN HUNGARY Historical background The technical and economic conditions for the construction of a public water supply network appeared and spread during the 17-18th centuries, typically in the big cities of industrialised Western Europe. Due to belated industrialisation, this process only started in Hungary in the second half of the 19th century. Figure 4. Danube water vendor on the streets of Pest at the end of 19'h century Industrialisation not only demanded water supply for industrial plants but also made it necessary to provide healthy drinking water to the ever-increasing urban population (Fig. 4). The first waterworks in Hungarian cities were built in the 1860s. With the advancement of civic democracy, the social demand for water was met with a growing attention on the part of local and national politics, and the issues of drinking water supply were approached with appropriate legal, financial and organisational decisions. A typical example of this was the construction of the first version of the Pest waterworks in 1868. As a result of developments, a unified authority was also created by the end of the 19th century and the country was ready for a widespread public water supply. In the framework of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Institution of Civil Engineering was set up in 1879 for the design and management of building small-scale water supply facilities. In 1890, the National Water Construction Directorate was founded under the direction of the Ministry of Agriculture. The Directorate was responsible for the water supply of cities and so the waterworks were built in Pécs, Miskolc, Sopron and Győr at this time. In Pest, organised water supply began in 1868. The first pump house stood in what is now Kossuth Square, but it had to be closed because of the building of the Parliament. The construction of the new waterworks was started in Káposztásmegyer in 1893. The building work was done in several phases and was completed in 1904. Following the turn of the century, the metropolitan waterworks of Budapest was able to supply drinking water for 1 million inhabitants (Fig. 5). Figure 5. Water tower on Margaret Island, 1913 At the same time, in the initial phase, 23 km of drinking water network was built in the capital, which has by now increased to 5000 km. Considering the development of medical science, hygiene practices were also changing. The urban population demanded larger and larger amounts of clean water for everyday life. In some ways, the increase of urban population and the process of urbanisation can be regarded as driving forces of water network development. In cities and towns interested in building waterworks, it was usually the civil engineering offices that were commissioned to design them. According to the summary of the National Public Health Engineering Service in 1898, there were altogether 244 bigger or smaller drinking water networks in 166 towns and villages. This meant that, together with drilled wells, altogether 4 million people, 23.8% of the population were supplied with healthy drinking water. By the First World War, the number of supplied inhabitants rose to about 5.5 million. This period was the first intensive phase of the development of drinking water supply in Hungary. In the 1930s, there were further significant developments around Lake Balaton. As of 1935, the water supply was centrally managed by the Ministry of Industry, which enhanced development and more organised construction. By 1944, there were central waterworks in 27 towns and 32 villages (Nagy 2013). Development after WW2 The actual development of water supply in Hungary started in the second half of the 20th century. There was a wave of large-scale waterworks development in the early 50s, and it was typical of the whole sector that the works were completely state owned. Parallel with this, the demand for water grew significantly. To meet the growing demand in Budapest, two surface water purification plants were built in 1957-1967: one in the territory of the main plant in Káposztásmegyer and the other on the Danube bank by the Northern limits of Újpest. The result of the fast implementation of these investments was the fact that by 1971, the rate of homes connected to the public drinking water network reached
