Andrei Filotti (1930)/biography

Andrei Filotti is a Romanian-born engineer, specialized in water management. In 1961-1962 he coordinated the elaboration of the National Plan for the Development of Romania's Water Resources, which established the orientation of the multipurpose use in the following decades. Afterwards, as Chief Engineer of the Research and Design Institute for Water Management he had the responsibility of coordinating the design of detailed water development schemes for specific projects for water use, flood prevention and water quality protection, ensuring their consistency with the general provisions of the National Plan.

He worked in water management related research having essential contributions in the field of mathematical modelling and use of operations research applied to water management and in the field of economics of water resources development. He was professor of water management and river training at the Faculty of Land Reclamation and Environmental Engineering of the Nicolae Bălcescu Agronomic Institute (now University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, Bucharest.

Andrei Filotti left Romania in 1982. He worked as Chief Technical Advisor in the United Nations Secretariat coordinating projects in India, Bangladesh, Chad, Senegal, Nigeria and other countries. After retiring from the United Nations Organization he continued working as a consultant for various organizations such as the Asian Development Bank and USAID, concentrating besides environmental engineering also on activities related to fighting corruption.

Childhood and studies


Andrei Filotti was born in Bucharest on October 27, 1930. His father Eugen Filotti was a Romanian diplomat, and his mother Elisabeta Filotti née Taşcă was the daughter of Gheorghe Taşcă, a Romanian economist and politician, who at that time was rector of the Academy of High Commercial and Industrial Studies.

From 1936 to 1940, Andrei Filotti studied in the primary schools of Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria where his father was posted as plenipotentiary minister.Then from 1940 to 1947 attended the high school at the Gheorghe Lazăr Lyceum of Bucharest, with the exception of school year 1944/45 when he attended school at the Dinicu Golescu Lyceum of Câmpulung-Muscel. Passing the last two classes in a single year, Andrei Filotti enrolled as student in the Faculty of Electromechanics of the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest. Due to transformations of the institute incurred as a consequence of the educational reform of 1948, Andrei Filotti graduated with honors in 1952 as hydroelectric engineer of the Faculty of Power Engineering.

Working as a design engineer, Andrei Filotti completed his studies later. In 1968 he attended a post-graduation specialization course at the Centre International des Stages' in Paris, France. In 1971 Andrei Filotti obtained his PhD in hydraulic engineering defending his thesis on the Use of computers in the water management the thesis being prepared under the leadership of Academician Dumitru Dumitrescu, the commission being formed including professors George Ciucu, Dorin Pavel and Ştefan Zarea.

Design Engineer at the Design Institute of Power Engineering
After graduation, Andrei Filotti was hired by the Design Insitute of Power Engineering (Institutul de Studii şi Proiectări Energetice - ISPE where he worked as representative of the design institute on the construction site of the Sadu V Hydroelectric Power Plant. In this capacity he supervised the construction of the temporary diversion dam, the headrace tunnel and the surge tank.

Research Engineer at the Institute of Hydraulic Research


In 1954, following a significant backscaling of the country's hydroelectric development plan, Andrei Filotti transferred to the Hydraulic Research Laboratory - later called Hydraulic Research Institute (Institutul de Cercetări Hidraulice - ICH) of the Ministry of Naval and Air Transportation. During the first years he supervised the construction of the hydraulic laboratory and after its completion was promoted head of the "Laboratory of Hydraulics of Structures", working on studies on hydraulic scale models. The main research conducted by Andrei Filotti in this capacity were:


 * study of the movement of silt on the Bala Branch of the Danube;
 * study of the river training of the Siret River in the proximity of the Scheia bridge;
 * study of the formation of air suction vortexes at the intake of the Brăila industrial plant.
 * study of water infiltration using electro-hydraulic analogic models.

Activity in water management
In 1959 transferred to the newly created Institute for Water Development Plans and Hydraulic Structures (Institutul pentru Planuri de Amenajare şi Construcţii Hidrotehnice - IPACH) working in this institute and its successors where he was successively team leader, advisor and chief engineer until his departure to the United States in 1982.

The institute had been put in charge of preparing the development plans of the Romania's river basins and was being reorganized in order to carry out this new assignment. In this institute, Andrei Filotti selected water management as his main professional activity.

Methodologic contributions
In 1959 water management was a concern of marginal importance, being viewed as an annex activity of water engineering. Andrei Filotti was instrumental in separating the structural and functional concerns, developing, with his colaborators, water management into a separate discipline and becoming its main representative. Besides working on the preparation of the development plans of the various river basins and on the national water development plan, and thereafter on detailed studies for different water management systems in Romania, Andrei Filotti focused on the development of specific methodologies for water management.

Extension of the field of water management
In 1959, water management was concerned mainly with assessing the best ways of satisfying the needs of water users. Andrei Filotti extended the areas of concern of water management, including new fields such as water management for the mitigation of adverse effects of water, such as flood water management or ground water management as well as water quality management.


 * In the field of flood control, in 1959 the prevailing conception in Romania was to protect the endangered area by dykes. The local solutions did not take into account the effect of the embankments on other parts of the river basin. Specifically, they did not take into account effects of the increased water level upstream of the embanked area due to the restriction of the river cross section. Similarly, they did not take into account the increase of the flood discharge downstream of the embanked area, as a consequence of the elimination of part of the flood plain. The new comprehensive flood water management approach, advocated by Andrei Filotti implied an investigation of the entire river system and, as a result, changed the solutions used for dealing with flood problems. Instead of considering embankments as the only solution for flood protection, Andrei Filotti's vision put more emphasis on the reduction of peak flows due to storage reservoirs or lateral polders, which would compensate the negative effects of discharge augmentation due to embankments and even eliminate part of these.


 * In the field of water quality management, the prevailing conception was that water quality in rivers could be controlled only by waste-water treatment plants, before their restitution to the river. The concept of water quality management also took into account the diffuse sources of river pollution mainly the run-off from the surface of the river basin as well as from groundwater. It also included the analysis of processes modifying water quality in lakes and rivers. Instead of using investigating only the water quality of the rivers during low discharges, when the concentration of pollutants was supposed to be highest and therefore were taken into account in sizing waste-water treatment plants, the water quality analysis covered the entire river hydrology and the possibility of influencing the water quality of rivers by modifying the river discharge through operations such as discharges from storage reservoirs. This created a link between water quantity and quality management.


 * Andrei Filotti also developed the concept of groundwater management, showing the connection between surface and groundwater. He also included in the study of water management systems the systems of increasing the groundwater resources by artificial infiltration from surface to ground water.


 * Finally he also included the management of sediment transport into the general analysis of water management. This included management of the river basin surface to prevent sediments from being washed into the rivers and the analysis of sediment related processes in storage reservoirs and rivers, in order to find solutions to diminish the adverse effects of siltation.



Systemic approach in water management
A second important theoretical contribution to water management was the systemic approach, in which the main emphasis was put on the assessment of the way in which the different elements of a water development scheme worked together. Before 1959, when work on water development plans had begun, hydraulic structures were designed and used independently, without any analysis of the links between them. The new concept took into accounts the various links, ensuring a coordination of various water users and the sizing of all elements of a water development system so that they could ensure this coordinated used. This was ensured during design, during the approval process of the various investments and finally during operation. The structures which previously had been viewed as independent, now became part of integrated water management systems.

As an example, in the early 1950s, the Izvorul Muntelui Dam on the Bistriţa River was approved and constructed practically exclusively for the Stejaru hydroelectric plant.Though it was shown to be able to provide water for irrigation of 200 000 ha in the Bărăgan Plain. However, the construction of the main irrigation canal was started only in the 1980s, and its construction has been delayed so that even after 30 years since inception it is not operational. The dam was also shown to reduce the flood discharges downstream. While this has been achieved for the lower reach of the Bistriţa River, the operation of the dam did not take into account the hydrologic situation of the entire Siret River basin and there have been occurences in the 1970s when the operation of the dam actually increased the flood discharges on the lower Siret River.

In the 1960s, the situation had changed significantly, due to the systemic approach. A typical example is the Vidraru Dam on the Argeş River which was promoted from the beginning as a multipurpose project. At the same time with the construction of the dam and the hydroelectric plant, the water supply systems of the cities of Piteşti and Bucharest as well as the irrigation systems on the Argeş valley were also approved and constructed. Similarly, the system based on the Paltinu Dam on the Doftana River, included not only the dam, but also a small hydroelectric plant, the Voila intake dam, a main canal used both for the industrial water supply of Ploieşti as well as for irrigation, the pipeline for the water supply of the city of Ploieşti, a secondary water supply system using groundwater and finally the regulation of the Dâmbu River in the city of Ploieşti were all simultaneously approved. This is to a great extent the result of the approach advocated by Andrei Filotti and which was subsequently applied to all water management systems in Romania.