The first stage of the NIKM project nearing completion

In 2009, the project NIKM (National inventory of contaminated sites) was launched. The goal of the project is to gather as much information about known and suspected contaminated sites in the Czech Republic as possible in a given time period and to perform simple risk-based assessment in respect to the health of people and the environment.  It is to result in a functional and sustainable database of such sites to enable high-quality monitoring and management of the process of cleaning old contaminated sites in the country. The database can also be used in town planning and in issues of protecting ground waters.
The project was designed in two stages. In the first stage, in the 2009-2012 period, tools and guidelines were to be prepared and created for the actual inventory taking in the second stage. Thus, the aim of the first stage was to ensure an efficient and unified method for the identification, recording and assessing contaminated and possibly contaminated sites.

Testovací území pro ověřování metodiky NIKM

The first stage of the NIKM project, to be finalised this year, is co-financed from the EU  Cohesion Fund within Operational Programme Environment (support area 4.2. – Remediation of historical environmental burdens). The project bearer is CENIA, the Czech Environmental Information Agency. The Vodní zdroje Ekomonitor s.r.o. company was responsible for preparing the guidelines for inventory taking. This involved a draft guideline, testing it in inventory taking in selected localities and making the final version based on evaluation of its testing.

The draft was submitted in 2010. Then the guideline was tested in three selected sites: A, B and C, each 50 x 50 km big, which was approximately 10% of the territory of the Czech Republic. Results of the testing were then used in the revised versions of the guidelines. The final version was handed over to the  CENIA in June 2012.