MANY IRISH water supplies need continuous monitoring to give early warning of pollution or bacterial contamination. Automated monitoring could help reduce health risks associated with these events.
Today marks the opening of a research unit at Dublin City University dedicated to such environmental monitoring. It should help protect human health but also offer a way to develop companies and create jobs, according to the research unit’s director, Prof Fiona Regan.
Mestech, the Marine and Environmental Sensing Technology Hub at DCU, will develop systems to provide continual, automated testing of water supplies, she said.
The same approach could be used to give early warning of flooding incidents, particularly localised events due to heavy regional downpours. It could also help monitor Ireland’s 74 blue flag beaches and other bathing areas, she added. “We are legislated to do grab sampling rather than continual monitoring,” she said.
“I do think we could have improved water quality. The problem we have is the level of monitoring, we are missing pollution events that are happening,” said the associate professor in environmental sensing in the school of chemical sciences.
More frequent monitoring could help, “particularly the group schemes because they are not monitored as much as the larger rivers and streams”, she said.
The private group schemes in Ireland were “notoriously bad in terms of E.coli contamination”. We tended not to hear about these small-scale problems, just the big ones that affect large populations, she said. Large-scale city water supplies can be affected by major contamination events. Hundreds of people became ill when Galway city’s water supply was shut down for five months in 2007 due to contamination by the dangerous pathogen cryptosporidium. That same year there were also E.coli and lead problems in that system.
The technology was now available to upgrade spot testing and weekly tests with continuous monitoring that gives daily, hourly or minute by minute monitoring. “You set it to your needs. Not every system would need hourly readings,” she said. Monitoring rates depended on the level of risk.
These systems use sensors in the water that can detect chemical and other changes. Researchers are trying to develop sensors that can warn about E.coli or cryptosporidium. The sensors are connected to communications systems that can relay information to distant locations via internet or radio connections. “The key is to get these systems tested in a real-world situation,” Prof Regan said.
Equally important was the potential for new companies and jobs arising from the research. There were commercial opportunities for Ireland. “We are building new industries within this niche area,” she said.
Mestech grew out of a series of exchequer and non-exchequer investments, in particular a €2.4 million grant provided in 2007 under the Marine Institutes’s Beaufort research award programme.
Prof Regan’s research group involves about 10 principal investigators and almost as many senior and graduate researchers.