Cork County Council plans for drought conditions

Cork County Council is planning to dispatch more specialist teams to bolster water supplies in vulnerable areas because of the likelihood of a repeat of drought conditions experienced last summer.

The council has already launched a pilot scheme, setting up two teams dedicated to detecting large leaks in mains which supply vulnerable areas and then repairing them. They have also bored new supply wells in such areas and expect to do more in the coming years because of climate change.

Council engineers said they were adapting the pilot project to tackle urgent supply situations and hope to expand it further as it is shown to be effective.

County engineer Kevin Morey said the council had put a number of proposals to Irish Water to beef up water conservation ahead of next summer.

Last summer, the teams bored six new wells to pump water to areas where their normal supply was drying up.

Water engineers said that during the summer, some water levels were at the lowest ever recorded level and there was a need to respond because climate change may well bring us longer, hotter summers.

It is believed that around 48% of all water is lost nationally through leaking pipes.

Engineers said they had found one very “significant” leak in the Liscarroll area of North Cork which they had fixed.

They also put a temporary dam on the River Allow, which rises in Limerick and flows through Kanturk into the River Blackwater.

The dam was erected because the river level went so low that drinking water couldn’t be taken from it.

Meanwhile, engineers have warned that lower river levels will lead to a change in supply for the Mallow area and the likelihood that the town will be served solely by hard water, which can lessen the life of a number of domestic appliances.

They made this known at a meeting of the council’s Northern Division in Mallow when queried about the hard water levels, caused by lime, on the northside of the town.

Engineers pointed out that around 80% of water sources for group schemes in the region are hard water.

They said that at present, the southern side of the town gets its water from a different supply and this is soft water.

However, they pointed out that as river levels continue to lower due to climate change and the population of Mallow increases, it is likely the whole town will end up being supplied from the Box Cross source.