Improvement in Clare’s public water, reports EPA

MICROBIOLOGICAL compliance in Clare County Council’s public water supplies was 100% in both 2009 and 2010, according to a new report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The report, entitled The Provision and Quality of Drinking Water in Ireland: A Report for the Year 2010, also shows that chemical compliance levels have increased from 99% in 2009 to 99.1% in 2010.
The EPA also featured a summary of boil water notices (BWN) and water restriction (WR) notices active or issued to consumers by Clare County Council during 2010.
“One water restriction notice remained active during 2010 from previous years. At the end of 2010, one boil notice remained active on the Ballyvaughan Public Water Supply and one water restriction remained active on the Ennis PWS. Both the Ennis BWN and WR were in place for a part of the supply and affected 18 and 80 people respectively,” the report confirmed.
Clare County Council is responsible for the operation of 23 Public Water Supplies serving a population of 80,313. The EPA is the supervisory authority over public drinking water supplies and provides powers of enforcement to ensure actions are taken where the quality of public drinking water is deficient.
Chairperson of the Council’s Environment and Water Services SPC, Councillor John Crowe welcomed the report adding, “The findings of this report are a tribute to the hard work of council engineers and staff, as well as the considerable investment made in upgrading public drinking water supplies across County Clare.”
Each year, the EPA collects and analyses over 250,000 Water Services Authority monitoring results for all drinking water supplies. The current drinking water quality report assessed the safety and security of drinking water supplies based on the results of Water Services Authority monitoring carried out in 2010 and enforcement by the EPA in the same period. Analysis is carried out on three groups of parameters, namely microbiological, chemical and indicator.
In Ireland, the majority of drinking water comes from public water supplies (84.8%) with the remainder provided by group water schemes and private supplies, including wells serving single houses.