IWA’s Heritage

Honouring IWA’s Distinguished Pioneers and
Their Legacies in the IWA history

To tell the story of the people that built IWA and its predecessor organizations IWSA and IAWPR/IAPRC/IAWQ was and still is a challenging task. We have chosen a “bio” format to provide a picture of these individuals. We created a format for these bios that reveals their stories in a consistent and concise manner, with a specific focus on IWA and their professional contribution to the organization, while at the same time allowing for color and wit to enter the picture.

These bios are labelled ‘Tailored Professional Tributes’ (TPT) – a term and acronym that will henceforth be used in this document.  In line with the TPT designation, the “IWA Distinguished Pioneer Tailored Professional Tribute” format was formally adopted as the standard for the development and presentation of IWA DP TPTs in this document and beyond.

Our default plan was to assign the writing of these TPTs to the person or persons closest to the individual in question, particularly the context of their roles and activities in IWA.  In practice, with the passage of time being the dominant explanation for departures from this ideal, the process of putting together a TPT sometimes met the ideal and for others, involved putting together pieces of the DP’s past, followed by a process of writing it up, followed by as much review as possible.  On the review side, each TPT was separately reviewed by between two and three editorial team members.

What follows are the tributes to approximately 50 fascinating people – people who through their imagination, commitment and hard work pooled their talents and intellects to develop a very special organization that we are proud to call The International Water Association.

An Important Point of Historical Reference for the Distinguished Pioneers

The backbone of the history of IWSA, and IAWPR/IAWPRC/IAWQ were a combination of the Associations’ Presidents and World Water Congresses. A significant number of the Distinguished Pioneers (who are all deceased) were also Presidents of their respective Association (shown in italics in the table).  They are listed in the table below, extracted from the IWA History Report.

IAWPR, IAWPRC, IAWQ
John Andrews
Denis Ballay
Pal Benedek
Bernard Berger
Louis Coin
George Ekama
Wesley Eckenfelder
Richard Engelbrecht
Petr Grau
Poul Harremoes
Bertil Hawerman
Kourokuro Hirose
Shigehisa Iwai
David Jenkins
Sam Jenkins
Ernst Kuntze
Gerrit Marais
Vladimir Medera
Gunther Mueller-Neuman
C D Parker
Erman Pearson
Hillel Shuval
Gerrie Stander
Wilhelm von der Emde

IWSA
Leonard Bays
Heinz Bernhardt
Cornelis Biemond
John Briscoe
Rene Brunotte
Guy Dejouany
Jan Dirickx
Francois Fiessinger
Pierre Giacasso
Keiji Goto
Tamon Ishibashi
Wilhelmus Krul
Fred Merryfield
Leonard Millis
L Pollet
Ken Roberts
William Richardson
Maarten Schalekamp
Heinz Tessendorf
Cornelis van der Veen

BOTH ORGANIZATIONS
Ken Ives
Charles O’Melia

IWA
Piers Cross
Ed Hulshof
Tony Milburn
Norihito Tambo