Parts of Achill Island without water for four days

Water outages on Achill Island cannot continue in this day and age, a local councillor has said.

Fianna Fáil Councillor Paul McNamara told members of the Westport-Belmullet Municipal District that some parts of Achill had no water for up to four days last week due to burst at two water treatment plants.

“We had one down the Keem Road and another up in Sraheens. Within a couple of hours, the water pressure in the reservoirs fell, so one part of the parish was completely dry,” Cllr McNamara said. “The bursts were fixed but it took a long time to bring the pressure back up and water was eventually distributed to houses.

“The problem isn’t going away, I have to acknowledge that there has been money spent on the plant but the main upgrade that would benefit the parish would be if there was a second reservoir put on site.” Cllr McNamara said currently, there is three to four hours storage on site, which is not enough.

“There’s a proposed reservoir, as the final part of the works, to be put on site, but that reservoir will only add another two hours of storage onto the site. What we’ll end up with is about six hours of storage. Most of Erris have over 24 hours of storage,” he said. “If this outage happened in peak season, we would have had a serious problem.” Head of the district, Pádraic Walsh agreed with Cllr McNamara, saying that 24 hours of storage was the standard practice. He promised to raise the issue with Uisce Éireann.