Leak lasted all day – while area under hosepipe ban

The water crisis that led to a hosepipe ban due to low water levels at Lough Owel came up for mention at the monthly meeting of Westmeath County Council last week. Another issue raised for discussion was a water outage that left a stretch from Ballynacargy to Moate without water on Sunday week last.

Councillors complained that they were unable to reach anyone in Uisce Éireann to alert them about the burst main that was causing the problem. “I rang at half eight. I could get no one until eventually I got someone in Cork,” said Cllr Johnnie Penrose, saying that for all that time, the burst pipe was pumping water on land.

He said thanks were due to county council staff who came out and switched off the water.

Cllr Penrose said he understood that the Uisce Éireann staff member who have had responsibility was away on holidays. “Should they not have a standby ready to take charge of that when they’re going away?” he asked, stating that it wasn’t until 7pm that someone from Uisce Éireann attended and repaired the damage. “It left people without water the whole day.”

Cllr Tom Farrell added: “I was in a daze, with complaints all day long,” he said. “There were businesses in Moate under pressure; there were schools last night that didn’t know whether to stay open or close today.”

He contended that when someone is going to be away, there should be another Uisce Éireann staff member on standby in case of problems arising.

Hosepipe ban

Meanwhile, Cllr Denis Leonard asked what the council was doing in terms of getting the message through to the public about water conservation, whether via the media or online.

“One of the downsides of not paying for water is that there’s still a lot of wastage going on, not just the pipes in the ground, but also taps not being fixed and the hosepipe ban probably not being really enforced either,” he said, going on to ask what the council intended to do to encourage people to guard what is a scarce resource.

Responding, Council chief executive Barry Kehoe said that the issue of water resources, including those at Lough Owel, was now the responsibility of Uisce Éireann and the council do not have any influence over how that organisation deploys resources or how they respond to outages such as those of Sunday week last.

“What we do is re-broadcast any communications we received through our local media channels, social media channels etc to try and increase the viewership of that,” he said.

He said it is up to Uisce Éireann to manage the situation and that was the purpose of having that single public utility that was established by government.

“So we just have to do our best to cooperate with that as we do but it is entirely a matter for themselves,” he said.