Uisce Éireann: Cork city will always have a 'small number' of incidents of water discolouration

UISCE Éireann, which is currently engaged in its second round of flushing of Cork city water mains in recent months, has said there will always be a “small number” of incidents of water discolouration in a network as old and vast as Cork’s.

The water utility company, which rebranded at the start of the year from Irish Water, this week commenced a two-week flushing programme which, the company said, would clear water mains of sediment and reduce discolouration.

In the months since the summer of last year, when the company opened its new Lee Road water treatment plant, complaints about water quality in Cork city reached unprecedented levels, and, eight months on, some areas are still suffering repeated incidents of discolouration.

As previously revealed in The Echo, after Irish Water opened its new Lee Road facility in July 2022, the company was inundated with calls as brown and orange discoloured water began to flow from taps in multiple locations across the city.

COMPLAINTS

According to information contained in documents released to Socialist Party TD Mick Barry after a Freedom of Information request, the number of complaints about water quality in Cork rose from 20 per week in the Lee Road plant’s first week of operation to 119 complaints in one week last August, which represented an increase of 495%.

In the four months after the Lee Road plant opened, the company received 610 complaints of discoloured water from residents across the city.

In 2022, Irish Water received 29 reports from people in Cork city complaining of illnesses suspected to have been caused by water consumption, compared to just one such complaint in 2020 and two in 2021.

In October of last year, following a series of questions from The Echo, Irish Water admitted that it had been responsible for the discolouration of at least some of the city’s drinking supply.

Responding to The Echo in October, the company said an adjustment of the chemicals used in water preparation had caused rusty sediment to be stripped from the inside of Cork city’s century-old water mains, resulting in discoloured water pouring out of household taps.

Irish Water did not respond when asked why it had waited until after The Echo had asked before admitting it had caused the discolouration.

Amongst the correspondence released to Mick Barry TD under FOI is an email, dated 22 August 2022, from Irish Water informing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of an increase in complaints of discoloured water.

The mail notes that water from the new Lee Road plant had entered the supply on 29 July and adds: “There is the potential that process changes, particularly the change in the pH corrective chemical in use, i.e. from Lime to Caustic, may be contributing to the problem and causing the water to become more corrosive”.

NO HEALTH RISK

The company has insisted that discoloured water does not pose a health and safety risk, while simultaneously warning people not to drink discoloured water and issuing assurances that water is safe to drink if taps are kept on until the water runs clear.

Asked this week about the current round of flushing, an Uisce Éireann spokesperson said Cork city has approximately 600km of water mains, up to 70% of which are cast iron.

“At the moment discolouration complaint volumes are low. However, when dealing with an old and vast water network like we have in Cork City, there are always going to be a small number of incidences of discolouration,” they said.

However, Mick Barry TD said he believed current levels of complaints did not reflect the high number of anecdotal incidents of discoloured water still being reported across the city.

“I note the fact that Irish Water say the volume of complaints about water discolouration are down but I have to say that I suspect a factor in this to be that people have just given up complaining at this stage,” Mr Barry said.

The Cork North Central TD said he was “deeply unhappy” at the apparent lack of speed at which Uisce Éireann was addressing the ongoing problems with Cork city’s water supply.

“Flushing is still taking up a very significant percentage of the time available to our skilled water services staff – time that could be spent improving the city’s water systems.

“There clearly are still issues with chemical imbalance at the privately-run Lee Road Water Treatment Plant and Irish Water need to change tack and aggressively tackle this problem in my opinion,” Mr Barry said.