WRL Hosts Myanmar Government's DWIR for River Hydraulic Training Course

In December this year, the UNSW Water Research Laboratory hosted six delegates from the Myanmar government's Directorate of Water resources & Improvement of River systems(DWIR - http://dwir.coffeecup.com/ ) on a two week intensive training course. DWIR’s primary responsibility is maintaining the navigability of Myanmar’s river systems, which remain the country’s most important transportation system.The most pressing issue with navigability of the river systems is dealing with increasing sediment loads caused by de-forestation of the catchment and also legal and illegal mine discharges.  Over the last twenty years or so, the political situation in Myanmar has meant that the country’s borders have been closed and the people largely isolated from the outside world.  The DWIR employees visited WRL to improve their knowledge of the leading edge techniques for assessing river hydraulics and sediment transport.

WRL provided the DWIR participants with a training course covering the fundamentals of open channel flow, analysis of hydraulic structures, river hydrodynamics and sediment transport, and numerical modelling techniques for river channels.  The training course also provided the opportunity to conduct field experiments on Sydney Harbour and visit examples of river bank and floodplain wetland restoration in the Hunter River valley where WRL's award winning work on wetlands continues in the Hunter Wetlands National Park (insert link to Tomago project).

The training was coordinated by the UNSW Global Water Institute(http://www.globalwaterinstitute.unsw.edu.au/) through the Australian Water Partnership(https://waterpartnership.org.au) which is coordinating a capacity building program in Myanmar addressing water resources planning and management on behalf of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.