Shannon supplying water to Dublin?

If water metering was about preventing loss, you could just run the meter for 3-6 months and send people notices telling them what their water use would cost if charging was in force. That gives people an opportunity to fix their leaks before getting hammered.

We have AMR in the house here in Toronto but the city is still working on getting them rolled out to every house, like my mother in law's who loves her lawnsprayer and doing half or quarter loads of laundry but gets a fixed bill.

antoobrien wrote: »

I don't know if the Dublin local authorities have something like this but surely if they're claiming wastage is still above 20% (prime time last week) they need to be doing something to identify where (out of 500m liters of water produced every day) approximately 100m liters of water are disappearing to every day.

Summary of what GCC are doing:
Split the 4 current water zones in the city council area into 80 separate zones of 800-1000 properties, with an extra 100m of mains and about 100 water meters to facilitate faster identification of leaks.

Link to article: http://www.galwaynews.ie/21114-citys-water-network-undergo-major-upgrade

A huge amount of the leakage is on private property. Personally I think stuff like meters should be at the property boundary, the pipe running on the property should be responsibility of property owner. In such a case it would become evident very quickly who has leaks due to the high usage reading etc.

dubhthach wrote: »

A huge amount of the leakage is on private property. Personally I think stuff like meters should be at the property boundary, the pipe running on the property should be responsibility of property owner. In such a case it would become evident very quickly who has leaks due to the high usage reading etc.

a) I don't believe any city council in this country when it comes to their claims that "it's not our fault". I can't recall vast amounts of money being pumped into the water system in Dublin, so I don't understand how it went from a major council problem to vast majority private users issue in a few short years. While I do agree there are issues with some private supplies the attitudes of the councils strikes me as more than a bit lazy (we've found 3 houses doing this it can't be our fault).

b) I think you've missed my point (I do agree with metering of water usage, which granted I haven't stated and is irrelevant to my point) - it takes an unacceptably long time is most parts of the country to find a leak. In this regard both my experience of leaks in Galway & Dublin broadly similar. During the water crisis of winter 2009, the water was gone for a considerable time in Killester while mains leaks were stubbornly hard to find.

John_Rambo wrote: »

After watching the Prime Time debate, listening to the DCC representative points, listening to the Shannon groups representatives unbelievable, petty, childish, selfish points and listening to the Doctors impartial points, it's a no brainer.

I sincerely hope you're being sarcastic with that - the DCC attitude was arrogant in the extreme. Their entire argument was based on the premise that it's not economically viable to fix problems contributing to losing over 100 million liters of water every day. What I heard in that interview can be roughly translated to: We couldn't be bothered to try save up to 20% of the taxpayers money that we spend on our water services, but we will gladly spend hundreds of millions more of said taxpayers money to do the same job. It's no wonder businesses across the country are up in arms about the various rates, levies and taxes they have to pay with attitudes like that.

The contrast, if one is capable of seeing it, is that Galway is actively doing something about the problem (and not falling into the blame everyone else trap yet-but I am waiting for it to happen). Dublin is whining about the scale of the problem and that it's not their fault (as usual), instead of actually doing something about what they already (are supposed to) control.

markpb wrote: »

I posted in this very thread a month ago about this (link). DCC picked a pilot part of the city, repaired the pipes and connections and then metered the water usage through that part of the system. They found that:

I saw that post, the conclusions are statistically unsupportable - 1 test from 600 areas - seriously is that what we're basing public policy on?

markpb wrote: »

I'm not saying that DCC don't need to do more work but you can't assert that it's all the councils fault and that they're not doing anything about it when a) they have proved that there is a significant failure outside of their control and b) they are fixing it, they're just not telling you when they do it

Sorry, but they haven't proved a citywide problem, they've proved that in one area there is a significant fall outside their control. These results can't be reasonably extrapolated across 600 regions - that's an unforgivably lazy assumption. To prove a city wide issue as the DCC insist, they'd have to prove the same issue in multiple areas (at least 10, probably more, but I'm not a statistician).

antoobrien wrote: »

a) I don't believe any city council in this country when it comes to their claims that "it's not our fault". I can't recall vast amounts of money being pumped into the water system in Dublin, so I don't understand how it went from a major council problem to vast majority private users issue in a few short years. While I do agree there are issues with some private supplies the attitudes of the councils strikes me as more than a bit lazy (we've found 3 houses doing this it can't be our fault).

b) I think you've missed my point (I do agree with metering of water usage, which granted I haven't stated and is irrelevant to my point) - it takes an unacceptably long time is most parts of the country to find a leak. In this regard both my experience of leaks in Galway & Dublin broadly similar. During the water crisis of winter 2009, the water was gone for a considerable time in Killester while mains leaks were stubbornly hard to find.

Well a dual approach is obviously needed. Divide the city into multiple "Cells" with monitoring on water usage/leakage in the backhaul eg. the Corpo pipes. Tie this with data coming from the meters on private houses and you should have sufficient data to:

• Identify that a certain "Cell" / "backhaul pipe" is suffering significant loss (water flow etc.)
• Correlate this with data from meters on usage, or for example what houses are suffering shortage -- thus enabling pinpointing of problem within the "Cell"

Of course it didn't help that there were people leaving their taps running 24/7 during the last cold spell. I would think metering would fairly quickly put an end to such bad practise.

Either way the current water infrastructure in Dublin (Vatry/Pollaphuca) were designed before the 1940's I think even if they were to reduce water loss to 5% there would probably be still some need to find another source of water given the massive growth in population in Dublin Metro area.

My own opinion is to tap the Shannon while it's in Winter flood. Every year we hear people complaining about flooding as well as calling for the "Shannon to be drained", no reason why it can't be drained by thirsty Dubs as oppose to the Atlantic.

antoobrien wrote: »

Ah hang on that's just ignorant of what causes the flooding in the Shannon basin, there are various pieces of legislation in place to stop normal dredging & clearing works from occurring. The winter floods in areas like Shannon & Gort (which doesn't have a massive river running through it, but still comes up with a big flood every few years) wouldn't be nearly as severe but for the environmental bureaucracy, which seems to be aimed at keeping tosses in jobs with more than a bit of making large tracts of the country inarable and uninhabitable on the side.

That's not my point tbh. I'm pointing out the contradiction on one side of "Drain the Shannon" versus "don't let Dublin have any Shannon water".

In the case of the Shannon part of the issue is no doubt down to the ESB maintaining the River at certain heights in event of "Dry periods" of course given that Ardnacrusha provides all of less then 5% of their power generation this is quite an antiquated objective of theirs. One proposal I've heard is that the ESB should increase their release at Parteen into the "Old bed" of the Shannon. Currently it's at 10 tonnes/second. One proposal was to increase it to 15 tonnes. This would reduce the power generation at Ardnacrusha by about 10% as well as improve the ecology of the "old bed" by removing silting etc.

As for Gort, the main issue in Galway is due to continual lack of investment in Arterial drainage. The last major works in Galway was probably the Clare river scheme in the 1950's! A prime example of haphazard work going on was dredging upstream of Craughwell which increased water flow. However nothing was done from Craughwell down to Kilcolgan. Result was massive flooding in 2009 around Craughwell which led to the M6 been open early to provide bypass for flooded N6 etc.

antoobrien wrote: »

The whole argument behind bringing water from the Shannon to Dublin is after all the floods (which shouldn't be happening in the first place)

The Shannon has always flooded, it's the reason why the Callows have always existed. My father who is from Athlone can easily tell you about annual floods in the 50's and 60's when he was a kid. To claim that it shouldn't be flooding is to take the attitude of "Corp of Engineers" when it comes to the Mississippi.

antoobrien wrote: »

The don't let Dublin have any Shannon water" campaign as you put it comes from the rather arrogant attitude of the DCC - literally what people are hearing is: we can't be bothered trying to fix our leaks, so we'll take your water instead - in this regard the DCC are their own worst enemy.

Ah, we are getting to the core now, it's about peoples attitude, not the bare facts, ie: Fook them, they aren't getting a drop of our water cause they have an attitude...

Oh, and it's not "your" water.

And if you think the Shannon flooding is a new thing you can try and blame on someone, you are mistaken. It's just a problem now that people want to and have built on the plains.

Wild Bill wrote: »

Seems from this map the Shannon gets half it's water from Leinster anyway. Give it back!

Given the tiny bit of the Shannon waste we want, this could be deemed a Water Repatriation Scheme.

It's the GDA's water in the first place. If we block up all the feeder rivers and divert the water to a bog in Offaly, the Shannon will be a dessicated runt of a river.

And yer flooding problems will be solved, even it yer terrible weather remains as it is!

The Shannon is truely "inter-provincial" it drains parts of Ulster, Connacht, Leinster and Munster. Not to mention the former province of Miḋe. Of course tbh what is now called Meath used to be know as Brega, the part that was actually originally called Miḋe (meath) is basically modern "Westmeath"

Carawaystick wrote: »

Maybe if the Dublin local authorities who got paid handsome development levies for each dwelling and business premesis they gave explicit permission to build during the boom had bothered their holes to build water treatment capacity and water supply infrastructure, maybe the scale of the problem would be reduced

Reduced but not eliminated. Dublin will need a new source of water regardless.

And the Irish Economy forum is the designated forum for mindless public sector bashing, perhaps you would feel more at home there.

Pete_Cavan wrote: »

Of course, regardless of leaks, the fact remains that Dublin still needs an alternative source of water as highlighted by the expert on last weeks Prime Time.

I did some checking on Galway - consumption is about 24m liters each day (given the estimated 50% unaccounted for out of production of 48m:mad: and if you believe their propaganda they have extra capacity at 24m).

By my figures Dublin need 384m liters of water each day based on a similar consumption pattern (based on a population of 75k which is low as this includes areas of the county, but they're not stated so we can't put figures on it) as Galway. DCC estimates 500m liters are used every day. IIRC production is somewhere between 525m & 575m liters.

The question that the rest of the country has is: What the f**k are you doing with somewhere between 115m and 200m liters of water every day?