Cork Council rules out buying a drain-cleaning machine for the county

By Peter McCarthy, Corkman

Cork County Council has ruled out buying a drain-cleaning machine, saying it would cost too much and also because one wouldn’t be enough to cover a county the size of Cork in a severe weather event.

In a motion at this week’s council meeting, Councillors Ger Curley and John Buckley had called on the local authority to buy a machine “in view of the adverse rain conditions and severe storms we are now receiving each year.”

“We need a comprehensive cleaning and maintenance programme for all drains for each Municipal District. Having a private operator can’t be financially viable and a lot of drains are not being cleared on a regular basis,” the motion said. The councillors argued that drains are frequently getting blocked by grit and other debris.

“Since becoming a councillor one of the biggest concerns is the state of the drains and the lack of clearing of the drains. We recently got a survey done in Cobh and there are 988 drains and gullies in Cobh alone, never mind the rest of the municipal district. We urgently need a jet machine as the majority of drains are not cleared on a regular basis,” Cllr Curley said.

“I don’t think hiring private contractors to clean out these drains and gullies every year is cost effective and it's highly unlikely that they're going to get to every drain and gully in the county. Purchasing our own truck and training our own outdoor staff to operate it would make strong financial sense in the long term. Our own staff know the drains and gullies that block every year,” Cllr John Buckley said.

However, Council Director of Services Padraig Barrett responded that a high-velocity, high-capacity drain-cleaning machine would cost more than €600,000. He said that in normal conditions it wouldn’t be used enough while after a storm one machine wouldn’t be sufficient.

“You could have five or six of those required on a day after a storm event. So one isn't enough, but equally then there’s no requirement in an ordinary week. It’s too expensive a machine to have idling and not being used on a permanent basis, you would want it operating all year round and we simply don't have that requirement,” Mr Barrett said.

Divisional Manager Niall Healy said the council currently has 11 mini-sweepers and eight large suction sweepers, all of which are fitted with drain cleaning capacity, namely suction pipes and water hoses that can be used to clean and suck out drains and gullies.

Mr Healy said that when required to supplement the council’s resources, external drain jetting contractors are employed to deal with specific issues or during bad weather. “In periods of severe weather there is usually significant demand for drain jetting units across the county and a single unit couldn’t possibly service this demand so the use of external contractors will always be necessary.”

Mr Healy said the council will consider a programme of works at municipal district level to use the existing sweepers for drain cleaning.