Council told of threat to water last year

New political exchanges erupted yesterday after it was revealed that a filtration system that could eliminate cryptosporidium…

New political exchanges erupted yesterday after it was revealed that a filtration system that could eliminate cryptosporidium and be installed within 10 weeks without disrupting the water supply was outlined to Galway City Council last September.

The council had approached some companies to assess the old water treatment plant at Terryland which it knew was vulnerable to cryptosporidium. The parasite has left the city and much of the county without safe tap water for five weeks.

A Cork company, Enva, noted the plant had no physical barrier to remove giardiasis and cryptosporidiosis. "This is a serious matter and a widespread danger to public health should an outbreak occur," it warned.

It proposed installing a sand filtration system to initially clean the water and an ultraviolet system to inactivate all known harmful micro-organisms.

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Yesterday general manager of Enva Water Treatment, Finbarr Pyne, said it would take between eight and 10 weeks to install.

However, Galway city manager Joe MacGrath defended the council's handling of the submission, saying it was legally obliged to go through a public procurement process before any solution could be progressed.

"The responses indicated that an interim solution was feasible. Having established this, Galway City Council, in accordance with procurement guidelines, immediately commenced the procurement of an interim solution by preparing a brief for the appointment of a consultant engineer to advance the provision of a pack- age treatment plant for the old water treatment plant," he said.

Mr MacGrath said invitations to tender have now been issued to seven firms ofconsultant engineers to install a package treatment plant at the old treatment plant.

However, Fine Gael councillor Pádraig Conneely said if the issue was deemed urgent enough the manager by law could have bypassed the public procurement process and appointed a company to clean up the water. "To think a warning of this magnitude was sitting on the city manager's desk pinpointing what could happen and pinpointing a solution and councillors weren't told and nothing was done for this long," he said.

Minister for the Environment Dick Roche, who has laid the blame for the crisis on city council officials, said he learned about the report last Friday. He was now sending it to the Environmental Protection Agency.

City mayor Niall Ó Brolcháin wondered whether it was Mr Roche who had leaked the submission to RTÉ. "It looks like Minister Roche is pointing the finger at the council again," he said.

"Rules, which come from the Government and from the EU, mean that public projects of the scale of the Terryland upgrade are inevitably slowed down by red tape and procedure.

"Minister Roche has contributed considerably to the delays by withholding the staff that the council needed to administer this project."