Discolouration issue ‘being addressed’ but it could be summer before Cork city water improves

It could be summer before a €1.6m investment might result in a significant improvement in water discolouration issues across Cork city, Uisce Éireann has said.

Officials from the company said discolouration would likely always be an issue until the city’s entire cast iron water main network is replaced, at a likely cost of hundreds of millions of euro over at least five decades.

Water discolouration has been a serious and intermittent issue across the city since the then Irish Water opened its €40m Lee Road water treatment plant and last year Uisce Éireann instigated a water quality taskforce to address the issue.

In late 2022, Irish Water told The Echo that an adjustment of chemicals used in water preparation at the Lee Road plant had caused rusty sediment to be stripped from the inside of the city’s aging cast-iron water mains, resulting in discoloured water in homes across Cork city.

Speaking at a briefing at the plant on Friday morning, Uisce Éireann officials said two new treatment processes, representing an additional investment of €1.6m, had been introduced which “should significantly improve instances of discolouration across the city”.

Those measures include the removal of manganese from incoming water, which is now in place, and the second involves a treatment process which will increase the alkalinity of the water leaving the plant.

Officials said that the process should strengthen the lining of the pipes and “as a result of increasing the alkalinity, the reports of water discolouration should go down … [and] that is on track to be in place and delivered by about the end of June this year”.

However, officials said water discolouration would always be an issue until all of the city’s water mains were replaced, which would cost in the hundreds of millions of euro, and would not be concluded for “possibly even longer than” 50 years.

Asked why they had not introduced ‘Do Not Consume’ orders in areas prone to discolouration, officials stressed that the water supply in Cork is safe to drink, but only when it runs clear, adding that people should not drink discoloured water.

Asked how people with impaired vision can tell if water is discoloured, an official said that people with visual disabilities “typically they will have someone coming in, looking in on them, and you would ask them to ensure that they had a couple of jugs of clean water in the fridge at all times that they would go to that”.

Asked again how a person with impaired vision living in an area prone to water discolouration would know when not to drink from the tap, the official said: “They should always drink out of the fridge in those cases I suppose”.

Uisce Éireann added that its measures to address discolouration included ongoing investment in the Lee Road plant and Cork city’s water infrastructure, water mains rehabilitation, regular flushing of the pipe network and ongoing communication with impacted communities and their elected representatives.