Water supplies coming under increasing pressure with no end in sight to drought-like weather
FIRE SERVICES ON ‘HIGH ALERT’ AS THREAT OF GORSE FIRES INCREASES
WITH Met Éireann predicting few precious breaks from the scorching weather over the coming days, organisations across the county are urging people to take appropriate measures to cater for rising temperatures.
Cork County Council’s water conservation management group has, in conjunction with Irish Water, called on communities and businesses to “be mindful” of all consumption of public water supplies.
“Every effort made by the public, at home or at work, will help alleviate pressure on the water system,” said a group spokesperson.
The message from Irish Water is a similar one with the company saying it was continuing to “manage water supplies through the drought conditions” while calling for the maximum conservation of water.
This came after it announced a country-wide hose pipe ban and the imposition of nighttime water usage restrictions on the Inniscarra and Kilbrin supplies.
The company also classified a number of supplies across Cork county, including Freemount, Castletownroche, Ballinatona, Mallow and Whitechurch as being ‘at risk’, urging people supplied by the schemes to be “especially mindful of their water consumption at this critical time.”
“Irish Water is continuing to ask the public to take sustained action to conserve water as weather conditions remain warm, and the drought is increasingly reducing capacity in rivers, lakes and wells, while our production plants struggle to meet increasing demands,” said a spokesperson.
“As well as reducing consumption, we are appealing to the public to report leaks on the public water network on 1850 278 278 and to repair private side leaks in both homes and in businesses.”
The spokesperson said Irish Water was working with local authorities to conserve water supplies examining how it could make further inroads into leakage by mobilising extra crews.
The company said it was also ‘ tankering’ water from larger schemes to top up falling levels in reservoirs, but conceded their work was becoming “more challenging” as the drought impacts spread nationally and reserves of water continue to fall across the country.
While Irish Water’s corporate affairs manager, Kate Gannon, thanked the public for their ongoing efforts to conserve water, she warned the situation was not likely to improve in the short to medium term.
“Met Éireann’s 10-day forecast predicts there will not be any rainfall, and water levels in rivers, lake and wells across the country are at a level that we would usually experience coming into the autumn,” said Ms Gannon.
“Given that we are only in early July, unless we continue to conserve water, we will be facing into ongoing restrictions over the months,” she added.
With an ‘extreme danger’ red warning still in place for forest fires, the station officer for the fire service in Mallow, Tony Douglas, has said they had been very busy dealing with blazes.
“Over the past week we have dealt with gorse fires in the Galtees, Bweeng and Blarney and were lucky to have been able to deal with them quickly before they got out of control. Our tanker has also assisted at fires in Cork city, Midleton and as far away as Bantry,” said Tony.
He said that apart from a couple of small field fires, the north Cork area has largely escaped without any major incidents.
“However, the ground is bone-dry, like a tinderbox so we are on high alert and are urging people to take care, not to light fires on dry ground, and to take particular care with cigarette butts.
This may seem like a small thing, but we have been called to at least two roadside fires that we believe were caused by carelessly discarded cigarette butts,” said Tony.
Meanwhile, with no sign of the heatwave ending any time soon, BoyleSports are currently offering odds of 15/2 that July will break the record of the lowest ever Irish monthly rainfall.
The record currently stands at 0.7mm, recorded way back in 1955.
While the bookie is offering odds of 11/8 on the highest ever temperature for July (32.3°C) being surpassed, the odds on July beating the all-time Irish record temperature of 33.3°C have drifted to 11/4 from 5/2.
For a more fanciful flutter, punters are offered 100/1 for Irish temperatures to reach 100° Fahrenheit (37.8°C) during July.