An Fóram Uisce welcomes The EPA Drinking Water Quality in Public Supplies Report 2019 released today. While some of the findings are welcome such as the fact that 99.9% of samples complied with bacterial parameter limits and 99.6% complied with chemical parameter limits it was very disappointing to note that 67 boil water notices were in place in 2019, affecting more than 650,000 people. Fifty nine of these notices lasted for more than 30 days thereby classified as long-term requiring significant investment in infrastructure to remediate.
As stated many times be An Fóram, more urgent action is needed from Irish Water on the implementation of its capital programme. The headroom available in our water supplies needs to be improved in order to address the ‘lack of resilience‘ identified by Dr. Burke from the EPA.
Our full response is available at: www.thewaterforum.ie/publications
