West Cork water main bursts ‘five times in seven months’

By Peter McCarthy, Corkman

Cork County Council is to write to Uisce Éireann, calling on the state-owned national water utility to replace an ageing water main in Ballinhassig in West Cork that has burst numerous times over the past year, including at the weekend.

After what it described as ‘a significant burst,’ Uisce Éireann said its crews were working to repair the water main and expected supply to be restored by Monday evening.

At a meeting of Cork County Council on Monday, Cllr Gillian Coughlan (FF) highlighted the impact on individuals, farmers, and businesses of the frequent disruptions to the Ballinhassig water supply. “It bursts very, very frequently, in fact it has burst in five of the last seven months,” she said.

Cllr Coughlan criticised the water utility for not contacting people on its vulnerable users list. “A mother rang me late last night coming from a supermarket in Cork city having bought water,” she said.

"She has a special-needs adult son who wears a colostomy bag and she was buying that water and would have to boil it up during the night to wash him if any accident happened. So this is the real impact,” Ms Coughlan added.

The Bandon-Kinsale Councillor said that the mother who contacted her had registered her son as a vulnerable user with Uisce Éireann “years ago and she has heard nothing during any of the breaks on that pipe. I think that really is reprehensible.”

Cllr Patrick Donovan (FF) agreed: “It’s highly important if you've got children or adults that need access to hot water for cleansing, for medicine, for equipment. I’ve a neighbour in Carrigaline who’s on that [vulnerable users] list and she’s never got a call, a text, nothing [from Uisce Eireann].”

Uisce Éireann claims that vulnerable customers who have registered with the utility “receive direct communications from us for planned and unplanned outages lasting more than four hours.” Cllr John Collins (Independent Ireland) said he talked to some of the workers who were working on the most recent Ballinhassig break and “one of them said to me this is really just a patch-up job.”

“It’s ironic that we have those from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael giving out about it and yet they are part of the political parties for the last ten years that have failed to invest in infrastructure and until that is done, this will happen again and again and again,” he said.