Fears 30,000 consumers could be hit with more water shortages

CLARE County Council has expressed concern that there may be a repeat of an incident last weekend where tankers had to be used to keep a local reservoir topped up because it was unable to meet the demand of over 30,000 consumers.

Last Saturday a fleet of fire brigade vehicles and other water tankers was used to transport hundreds of thousands of litres of water from Shannon and Newmarket-on-Fergus to a newwater treatment plant in Ennis after a systems failure threatened to let the town and several villages run dry.

The Ennis Water Treatment plant had been unable to process the required amount of water to cater for consumers on the Ennis water supply when its filtration system became clogged with organic material. This followed intense rainfall which meant that water in the Drumcliffe Spring became contaminated.