CITY TRIBUNE
Galway City Council launches stinging rebuttal on sewage claims
From this week’s Galway City Tribune – Galway City Council this week launched a stinging rebuttal of a report produced by An Taisce which claimed raw sewage was leaking into Galway Bay at alarming rates.
In a report to councillors this week, findings from An Taisce that up to 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools of sewage were flowing into the Corrib at Long Walk were disputed as the Executive expressed disappointment that the environmental watchdog didn’t engage with City Hall when compiling the report.
Senior Executive Engineer Lieze Fanning told councillors that while she didn’t feel the Council was ‘at loggerheads’ with An Taisce, there was disappointment that the body didn’t engage with the City Hall before publishing its report.
“A series of FOIs were sent and each one, they came back to say it wasn’t what they wanted. We offered to meet with them but they declined. An Taisce are not our regulators – the EPA are our regulators,” said Ms Fanning.
The An Taisce report, authored by its Head of Advocacy Ian Lumley, claimed Mutton Island Wastewater Treatment Plant did not have capacity to deal with the city’s sewage.
Ms Fanning disputed this and said the plant had another 20 to 30 years before it reached capacity, adding that Irish Water were currently carrying out a study on what Galway’s wastewater requirements would be thereafter.
On the leak at Long Walk, Ms Fanning said that it was storm water overflow that was entering the water and not raw sewage.
“The calculation used by An Taisce [that came to 35 swimming pools per month] is out by about tenfold. They assumed that the overflow was discharging every minute of every hour of every day.
“We know for a fact that it is not discharging every second of the day,” said Ms Fanning, adding that CCTV footage had been used by the Council to establish the rate of overflow.
This is a shortened preview version of this article. To read the rest of the story, see this week’s Galway City Tribune. You can buy a digital edition HERE.