A year after our last water crisis, Ireland is struggling again with shortages and burst pipes. Yet not one kilometre of mains was replaced in Dublin in 2010. Only by spending heavily every year for a decade can we hope to fix our water infrastructure, writes FRANK McDONALD, Environment Editor
IT WILL take at least 10 years of sustained investment to replace or rehabilitate the decaying or substandard water mains that have burst in Dublin and elsewhere over the past fortnight, depriving thousands of people of one of the basic necessities of life during the Christmas holidays.
As Dublin City Council’s chief engineer, Michael Phillips, said this time last year when another rapid thaw caused similar difficulties, “there is no magic wand we can wave” to solve the problem. Much depends on the political priorities of the next government.
Given that domestic water charges are not due to be implemented until 2014, as pledged in the present Government’s recovery programme, hundreds of millions of euro in public money will have to be found over the next three years to pay for the work that needs to be done.
In Dublin, the demand for water surged to 610Ml – that’s megalitres, or 610 million litres in plain language – on St Stephen’s Day and 625Ml the following day. “This was by far the highest two-day demand we ever had,” says the council’s chief sanitary-services engineer, Brian Smyth. “We lost 130Ml from storage, just like that, and we’re still trying to recover.”
“It was as if someone had pulled a plug at the reservoirs,” says the Fingal county manager, David O’Connor. This unprecedented level of water loss happened even though all schools and many businesses were closed for the Christmas holidays.
What aggravated the problem was the extraordinary speed of the thaw after such a prolonged cold spell. Temperatures in some parts of the country rose from minus 15 degrees to plus 10 in just 36 hours.
Ground movements caused by the freeze and rapid thaw led to water mains and service pipes bursting, according to Gerry Galvin, the principal engineering adviser for water at the Department of the Environment. Many household connections were also affected, mainly because they had not been laid deep enough.
“Since the late 1970s building regulations have required all services to be protected from the elements, with pipes to all new houses laid a minimum of 600mm below the surface,” he says.
Many of the leaks arose in unattended commercial premises, which is why appeals were made to keyholders to carry out urgent checks. “More than 5,000 leaks were repaired over the past week throughout the country, ranging from small leaks to burst mains,” Galvin says.
“In most areas supply has been restored, even at low pressure and with night-time restrictions as local authorities continue to replenish depleted reservoirs.”
Co Clare was the “worst affected” this week. The duration of cuts will vary until reservoirs are full again, he adds.
Last April, Minister for the Environment John Gormley published details of a new water services investment programme worth €1.5 billion over the three years from 2010 to 2012. Of the total, €320 million was earmarked for the replacement or rehabilitation of defective or leaking water mains. “This will replace about 600km of the worst mains,” says Galvin. “But it’s going to take a considerable length of time sustaining the same level of investment if the problem is to be solved.” His own estimate is that just dealing with the worst mains will take 10 years.
The problem for this country is that our low population density means we have an awful lot of water mains – 25,000km in all, more per 1,000 people than any other European country. “Barcelona, with three times Dublin’s population, has only 4,500km of water main, compared to 8,000km in Dublin.”
To avail of the latest tranche of funding, each local authority with responsibility for water had to submit a “mains replacement and rehabilitation strategy [to the department], in order to ensure that we’re getting the best bang for our buck”, as Galvin puts it.
Dublin City Council is ahead of the posse because it put in place telemetry systems and district meter areas, which allow it to target mains for the best returns. (Telemetry systems allow workers to monitor water systems remotely.) As a result, “in the next two years, 100km of mains will be replaced” in the city and its water region.
According to the council, levels of leakage in the region have been reduced from 43 per cent in the late 1990s to about 30 per cent. Since 2006, however, only 60km of defective water mains have been replaced – 10 per cent of the total needing renewal.
Not a single kilometre of leaky mains was replaced in Dublin last year, despite last January’s water crisis. Work is due to start shortly on rehabilitation schemes in Dún Laoghaire, Bray and Wicklow under three separate contracts, and two further tenders will close next month. As a result the length of mains replaced or rehabilitated is expected to increase to 115km by the end of this year.
Projects to renew a further 165km are “sitting on the shelf ready to go as soon as we get a nod from the department,” says Smyth.
In the past most of the emphasis in successive water-investment programmes was on water and sewage treatment schemes, driven by a legal requirement to meet the terms of EU water-quality directives. This meant that water-main renewal was virtually neglected.
AFTER REVELATIONS THAT the leakage rate in some counties, such as Roscommon, Kilkenny and south Tipperary, was more than 50 per cent, compared with less than 20 per cent in south Dublin, John Gormley decided to “make it a priority after years of underinvestment”. The programme he launched last April would provide “record levels of investment in both overall water infrastructure and, in particular, mains rehabilitation”.
He also dismisses Fine Gael’s proposal for a national water authority, pointing to the experience of Northern Ireland Water, which has been criticised for leaving thousands without supplies over Christmas.
On Thursday, after a lengthy board meeting and consultations between lawyers, it was announced that Northern Ireland Water’s Scottish-born chief executive, Laurence MacKenzie, was stepping down after 18 months in office. It was said to be a personal decision. Nonetheless, as the publicly-owned company’s website says, MacKenzie was “responsible for the overall performance of Northern Ireland Water”.
That’s not how it turned out. Over a three-day period after Christmas, Northern Ireland Water was bombarded with 600,000 phone calls, 10,000 e-mails and 500,000 hits on its website from customers who had been left in the lurch. An independent investigation has been ordered. A six-hour meeting of the Stormont Executive on Thursday night agreed that the inquiry will look into the performance both of the company and of Regional Development Minister Conor Murphy, of Sinn Féin, during the crisis. Murphy has rejected calls that he should resign.
Gerry Galvin says Northern Ireland Water “didn’t have the resources to draw on to fix leaks whereas councils here were able to redeploy staff from other departments to help with this work”. It also seems that there was a “water production problem” in the North.
He also points out that privatised utilities in Britain, including Anglian Water, Yorkshire Water, Scottish Water and Welsh Water, all had similar problems to ours. “I’ve looked up all their websites – it’s just that they didn’t receive as much media coverage,” he says.
Galvin says the €4.6 billion invested in Irish water infrastructure between 2000 and 2009 “compares very favourably with the UK”, where €90 billion worth of investment was made by British water companies, given the difference in scale between the two countries.
One issue on which Gormley is clear is that any proposal to set up a privatised national water utility here “has to be resisted tooth and nail”. The idea of “making money out of it should be anathema to right-thinking people”.
Water charges Can we afford not to pay?
Charging for water is on the agenda under the four-year Government recovery plan approved by the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. “It has always been Green Party policy,” says John Gormley, its leader. But even he is considering giving every household a “free allocation” and charging only for overconsumption, a formula experts in the area regard as problematic. “How can you tell from the outside how many people are living in a house?” says one sceptic.
“Fitting meters is going to be a very expensive business and will take a long time. It’s a huge undertaking, and the cost nationally is likely to be between €400 million and €500 million,” says Brian Smyth of Dublin City Council.
“Any free allocation of water doesn’t make sense. We don’t know how that’s going to be worked out, given the varying size of households. Officially, we’re waiting for the minister to tell us how to proceed, but nothing has happened yet. He still has to bring his proposals to government for a national meter-installation programme.”
Ireland’s consumption of water, at 150l per person per day, is among the highest in Europe. There is no doubt that this is related to the absence of any direct charge for domestic users, as it encourages them to regard water as a free resource that they can use liberally.
The average water charge in Britain is £340 (€400). Gerry Galvin, of the Department of the Environment, says it would be “something of that order” here. Elsewhere in Europe, even capital costs are passed on to the consumer.
There is some resistance to paying user charges. British water companies have accumulated £1.5 billion in bad debts because of people who either can’t or won’t pay the bills. “High levels of debt servicing are also a drain on [companies’] resources,” Galvin says.
In Ireland, commercial and industrial users are charged €1.81 per cubic metre of water – one of the cheapest rates in Europe. But many are in arrears, leaving local authorities with up to a third less in revenue than they had expected to earn from this resource.
Gormley insists he is taking a realistic view. “The idea of getting rid of [domestic] water rates was utterly nonsensical from a water-conservation viewpoint,” he says. “I see water as probably one of biggest issues facing countries globally.”
At EU Environment Council meetings, the new buzz term is WSD, for water scarcity and drought.
“We take it for granted when we see it falling out of the sky, but water has to be treated, and there’s going to be increasing demand for it everywhere,” says Gormley.
Water charges are seen as the key to reducing demand. Without them there is no incentive for people to install water-efficient devices such as the dual-flush toilets that are now mandatory for new homes under amended building regulations introduced in 2008.
But modest measures like that won’t deter Dublin City Council from pursuing its controversial plans to take water from the River Shannon and pump it first to a huge reservoir to be constructed in the midlands and, from there, to the capital.
