Speaking at the recent meeting of Athy Town Council, Cllr Richard Daly said that the recent lack of domestic water within the county must accelerate the need for dramatic measures to promote water harvesting.
“In the wake of the water shortage we all are asking what went wrong when up to recently we were assured that, particularly in Athy, water supply would be adequate. But as time advances so many of our sources are becoming unreliable. In Athy we will this year we have some €300,000 set aside to connect to another supply coming from the Monasterevin direction and in 2012 the multi million Barrow Abstraction facility will draw millions of litres from the Barrow in Athy to augment the county supply.
The most obvious source of water is as yet being untapped. While we are looking in future years at the possibility of sourcing water from the Shannon to serve the Greater Dublin area, we have ample supplies of the material literally falling from the skies on an almost daily basis. We are failing to treat drinking water as a precious resource and continue to use treated water to flush toilets and wash cars. Anybody who was forced to carry buckets of water recently to flush toilets will be aware of the volume of treated water which we literally flush down the toilet each week.
It is time we started to get serious in the harvesting of the free water which falls on our roofs almost too frequently. In former times our forefathers saw the value of storing water and each house used water barrels and water tanks to supply water for the several uses but with the arrival of many of the water schemes this was all abandoned.
I will be encouraging both town and county development plans to insist on water harvesting systems in all new developments both industrial and domestic and try to help develop a society where we treat clean water as a precious resource. We must also promote and grant aid the retro fitting of harvesting systems in existing houses” said Cllr. Daly
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