The contamination of Roscommon’s water supply is due to an animal–related organism, tests have revealed.
Up to 6,000 people in Roscommon town and surrounds are being affected by the discovery of cryptosporidium in the local water supply. A boil water notice has been in place since April 25th.
The contamination can cause cryptosporidiosis—a gut infection caused by a parasite and resulting in a diarrhoea–type illness. People in the area have been advised by Roscommon County Council and the HSE to boil all water for drinking, preparation of salads and for use in brushing teeth. Both bodies have set up an Incident Response Team to deal with the outbreak and to minimise the risk to the public.
9 May 2013
The Irish Times
BRIAN MCDONALD

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 Engineering surveys to establish where domestic water meters can be installed have not been completed by any local authority, even though the installation programme is due to start in three months’ time.

Just half of the State’s 34 city and county councils have started surveys to locate the stopcocks for the 1,050,000 households connected to the public water supply. Four local authorities have given no indication of when they intend to start their surveys.

Irish Water’s meter installation programme is due to begin in July and be completed by 2016. The Government is committed under the EU–IMF rescue plan to start charging households for water in 2014.

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The quality of drinking water in “high–status” rivers and lakes has dropped dramatically in recent years.

Traditional farm activities such as field drainage, the use of fertilisers and pesticides, and overgrazing are being cited as contributory factors. Forestry, wind farms, and one–off housing also threaten natural water sources, while septic tank discharges and accidental releases of pollutants are other key factors. 

The risks to drinking water supplies are highlighted in a new Environmental Protection Agency report. Studies show that, in 1987, a reported 30% of rivers were designated “high status”, but that rating slumped to 17% by 2008. 

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 A judge described legal proceedings being brought by a small rural community against a local authority and An Bord Pleanála as “very complex and important for all concerned’’.

 An action by people in Bonane, Co Kerry, against Kerry County Council and the planning appeals board was due to start at the Circuit Court, in Killarney, yesterday, and was expected to take three to four days. However, the hearing was adjourned by Judge Pauline Codd to allow for an exchange of documents between the parties. 

Seventeen named people are challenging the council’s proposal to take water from the River Sheen to supply Kenmare town and surrounding areas. 

An Bord Pleanála gave the proposal the green light, in late–2011.

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 An ancient river valley community is taking legal proceedings against Kerry County Council over plans to extract water from a river to supply Kenmare town.

An Bord Pleanála gave the go–ahead in late 2011 for a proposal to take water from the Sheen River to supplement the water supply. The tourist town is running short of treated water. Attempts to locate supplementary supplies have been continuing for almost a decade. But the proposal to take water from the river — near the Sheen Falls, a point at the end of the valley near Kenmare — has been stoutly resisted at all stages.

 An oral hearing into the proposal in Apr 2011 heard objections from farmers, anglers and environmentalists, as well as an inspector from the fishery authority.

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More than 30,000 households across the country may be at risk of lead poisoning from drinking water supplied through lead pipes.

Four county councils are under orders from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to replace the last known four kilometres of lead piping in public water mains. But the EPA warned there may be other lead mains dating back to Victorian times that have not been identified because there are no surviving records of them. 

And the agency says there is a more pressing problem of private households that are served by modern public mains but have old lead pipes running through their property, connecting the mains to their taps.

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Irish collection rate is lower by one–third than in UK

JUST OVER half of water charges for business users in Ireland are collected, according to the Commission for Energy Regulation, which will be the State watchdog for water services. 

Denis Cagney, director of gas, legal and renewables at the regulatory authority, said the collection rate for non–domestic charges in Ireland is 53 per cent, compared with 78 per cent in the UK. 

The Irish rate is thus almost one–third lower (32 per cent) than the UK’s. Despite the poor enforcement rate, however, Mr Cagney told the Dublin Economics Workshop conference in Galway it was “very important to get the inevitability of paying for water bedded down”.

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HOMEOWNERS will have to pay a flat fee for water charges for two years from 2014 because of unexpected delays in installing meters across the country.

Irish Water has warned the government that it will take more than three years to fit domestic meters in more than a million homes because it cannot achieve a rate faster than 27,000 a month. 

The installation programme is due to begin next summer.This means that by 2015, about 500,000 homeowners will be paying flat fees for their water supply while another 500,000 will be metered.

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Opposition to the new water charge is likely to grow if all households cannot be metered

PLANS TO start installing domestic water meters by the end this year are looking increasingly remote because of a lack of information on the location of household water supply points.

Water meters cannot be installed until the location and number of household stopcocks has been determined. Tenders for the supply of meters have yet to be advertised.

Senior water industry sources now say it would be inconceivable that universal metering could be in place by 2014, the date by which the Government has committed to charging for water. The sources say it will now be 2016, at the earliest, before national metering could be achieved.

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Bathing water at contaminated beaches in Cork had nearly four times the permitted EU level of the E.coli bacteria, which if ingested can cause severe vomiting, diarrhoea, and in some cases even death.

The highest reading for the bacteria, which is normally found in excrement, was at Youghal’s Front Strand.

It’s not safe to bathe where the level of faecal coliforms, such as E.coli, exceed 2,000 in 100ml of water. At the Front Strand a reading taken on Aug 14 was 7,701.

The strand, along with the town’s Claycastle beach, lost its Blue Flag status for high–quality bathing water last year.

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Around 1,400 homes and businesses in Clontarf, north Dublin, received warning notices on Sunday night from Dublin City Council.

Water tankers were stationed at several locations in the area yesterday from 10am until 9pm.

Householders have been warned not to drink or cook with tap water as a precautionary measure after the tests last week found unusually high levels of bacteria.

The luxurious Clontarf Castle Hotel in Castle Avenue was among the properties affected. It was given its own tanker yesterday by the council.

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Northern Ireland will be hit with EU fines if money isn’t invested in cleaning up waterways. DOE officials revealed that fewer than a third of Northern Ireland’s water bodies (28%) are of good ecological status. It will be a significant challenge to reach the 59% target, set down in the EU’s Water Framework Directive, by 2015.

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The Government’s plans to give householders a free allowance of water — after which they will have to pay for consumption — have been described as “costly” and “unfair” by one of the country’s top thinktanks.
Tasc said the free allowance proposed under the new water charges plan was an inefficient use of scarce resources.

The body criticised the Government for planning “to subsidise all households regardless of means and circumstances”. The charges are due to begin in 2014.

Spokesman Alex Klemm said any water charges must prioritise equality and the environment.

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A MINUTE quantity of the waterborne pathogen cryptosporidium was detected in Dublin’s water supply last month. Dublin City Council confirmed yesterday that a sample taken from the Stillorgan reservoir in south Dublin tested positive for “small levels” of the bug on February 13th.
However, the council said the finding did not automatically mean there was a problem with the water system.
As part of a follow–up protocol to check whether there was an actual problem with water quality, further samples were taken which found no evidence of cryptosporidium contamination.

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In late September last, the local authority discovered that a water scheme supplying householders at Gortnaskehy at Araglin was contaminated with E coli bacteria.

After consulting with the HSE, the council issued a boil water notice which remains in place.

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This means that some families will be forced to pay for water based on the average use of their neighbours, with no reward for cutting consumption.

Work on installing meters in 1.5 million properties will begin later this year, but it will take up to three years to install meters in every home in the country.

Homes with meters will be billed on the amount of water they use, while those without will be forced to pay a charge based on the average use of people in similarly-sized properties.

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The Lee Road facility, on a flood plain in Cork, must be moved to higher ground; an unstable 150-year-old tunnel from the Vartry reservoir in the Wicklow mountains should be replaced; and the Staleen plant in Co Meath needs to be overhauled.

The Environmental Prot-ection Agency (EPA) named the three sites on a remedial action list that plans works for 240 facilities.

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Cryptosporidiosis, an infection caused by a parasite that infects cattle and other domestic animals, infected 10 people per 100,000 in Ireland in 2009, compared to an overall confirmed case rate across 30 countries of 2.74 per 100,000.

The parasite which causes the disease - cryptosporidium parvum - has elements that survive well in the environment and human infection arises from "a range of environmental contacts, including contaminated water and care centres for young children", according to the Annual Epidemiological Report 2011 of Eurosurveillance, an online scientific journal that monitors the surveillance and control of communicable diseases.

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