Water woes set to continue for another week at least

Date Published: 30-Dec-2010

by Dara Bradley

Under-fire City Hall officials have insisted they are doing everything they can to deal with the city’s ongoing water crisis but have conceded water shortages and outages for thousands of homeowners and businesses will last for at least another week.

City Council management, under sustained criticism from elected members, did a U-turn yesterday and belatedly provided water tankers on the east and west sides of the city after initially saying they would not do so.

And as the City Manager and Directors of Services were accused of “being asleep” during the emergency and “failing in their statutory obligation” to provide water, the Council quashed fears that the city water supply would be completely cut off at source overnight, as is happening in many parts of the county.

Director of Services for Transport and Infrastructure, Ciarán Hayes, said supply would not be shut-down but the amount of water released from reservoirs will be restricted meaning continuing widespread low pressure and outages of water in all city areas for the next seven days. Buildings that had water restored may lose it again in the coming days.

Mr Hayes would not commit to increasing pressure on New Year’s Eve for the benefit of city pubs and restaurants insisting the Council was doing everything they can to conserve water and identify leaks in the network. He said demand for water has increased by 10% since the thaw set in on St Stephen’s Day and, while the percentage increase sounds moderate, it is bringing water reserves to ‘critically low’ levels because of a limited storage capacity.

“The storage capacity in the network at any given time is between 12 hours and 24 hours, so when you have a spike in demand for water of 10% over a prolonged period of time it is naturally going to drain the network and eat into the resources,” Mr Hayes said.

City Councillor Pádraig Conneely has lambasted management for “sitting on their hands” during the crisis and he demanded that the Mayor of Galway City, Cllr Mike Crowe, convene an emergency Council meeting so that Councillors could be briefed.

As thousands continue to struggle without water, hundreds of homeowners and businesses in Galway are counting the cost of damage caused by burst pipes in the post-Christmas thaw – it is estimated the bill for the destruction of premises throughout the county could run into millions of euro.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.