Illness complaints to Uisce Éireann surge by 103% in two years since new Cork treatment plant opens

In the two years since Uisce Éireann’s €40m Lee Road water-treatment plant for Cork city opened, the company has recorded a 103% increase in complaints of illnesses suspected of being caused by dirty drinking water.

Since the plant opened in the summer of 2022, homes across the city have experienced persistent brown and orange discoloured water.

In 2022, the company received 29 complaints from Cork people who suspected they had been made ill by drinking dirty water, an increase of 1,350% on 2021, when it had received two such reports.

Now, following a query from The Echo, Uisce Éireann, has disclosed that in 2023 it received 41 reports of illness suspected to have been caused by dirty water, and in 2024 it received 59 such reports. The 2023 figures mark a 41% increase on 2022, and the 2024 figures show a 44% increase on 2023.

The 2024 figures, which show 59 reports of illnesses suspected of being caused by dirty drinking water, are more than double the 2022 figure of 29, or an increase of 103%.

According to Uisce Éireann, the combination of an adjustment of chemicals used in water preparation at the Lee Road plant and increased water pressure caused rusty sediment to be stripped from the inside of the city’s aging cast-iron water mains, resulting in intermittent and ongoing problems with discoloured water in homes across the city.

Prior to the Lee Road plant opening, Irish Water received about seven reports of water discolouration a day, but the company saw a surge in complaints after the plant was commissioned.

Spikes in complaints about water discolouration were recorded between August and September 2022, with more than 40 reports on some days; between November 2022 and February 2023; between September and October 2023; and again between August 28, 2024 and September 3, 2024, when complaints peaked at about 80 a day on one day during that time.

Two weeks ago, Uisce Éireann officials said it could be summer before a €1.6m investment might result in a significant improvement in water discolouration issues across Cork city.

Those measures include the removal of manganese from incoming water, already in effect, and a treatment process which will increase the alkalinity of the water leaving the plant, strengthen the lining of the pipes.

Officials said that “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, they admitted that discolouration would probably always be an issue in Cork 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.