Inaction ‘not an option’

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Rural Water News Spring 2008 12
Rural Water News Spring 2008 South Leinster DBO Project Concerns have been raised that the construction timetable for the South Leinster DBO bundle project is not on schedule. DBO Contractor, EPS Ltd, accepts that there has been slippage on the revised programme agreed last autumn and that the 18 May deadline for completion is unlikely to be met. To counteract programme delays, the DBO Steering Group has requested that EPS dedicate additional resources to the project. Current status Construction of the civil and mechanical and electrical works is at or near completion on approximately 26 sites, with the remaining 7 sites due to commence in the next few weeks. The critical path at this stage is in the commissioning and process proving area of the programme. To date, 14 plants have been commissioned or are going through process proving. EPS has submitted a revised commissioning programme and has added additional staff to the commissioning crews. It is hoped that this will help minimise the programme slippage. To date no Take-Over- Certificates (TOC) have been issued to the contractor, due to some critical snagging. However many of these snags have been dealt with over the past two months and it is likely that TOCs for the first six GWS plants will be issued very shortly. Septic Tank Study Startling Evidence from Preliminary Results The National Source Protection Pilot Project at Churchill & Oram GWS has released preliminary figures from its ongoing survey of on-site wastewater treatment systems in the Milltown Lake catchment. These suggest that up to 65% of systems are not functioning as intended and have the potential to contaminate source water supplies. The release of this startling evidence coincides with the formation of a sub-committee of the National Rural Water Monitoring Committee, set up to focus on the issue of septic tanks and to suggest ways in which the potential threats may be controlled or eliminated. Several members of the Source Protection Pilot Project have been co-opted to this sub-committee, including Director of the DkIT Centre for Freshwater Studies, Dr Suzanne Linnane. Study To date, 145 householders in the Churchill & Oram GWS area have completed questionnaires about their systems. Of these, 45 systems have been assessed non-intrusively through a combination of methods, including estimation of loading to the systems, measurement of system dimensions, visual inspection through the normal inspection accesses and of the percolation areas, as well as determining whether conditions of planning were adhered to. In addition, 5 systems have been intrusively examined through borehole installation in and around the vicinity of the systems and plans are in place to install further boreholes, subject to community 13 Some of the malfunctioning septic tank systems that have been examined as part of the Source Protection Pilot Project at Churchill & Oram GWS. To date, 145 local householders have co-operated with the septic tank survey. co-operation, which so far has been unfailing. Western RBD The extension of this part of the source protection project comes about as a direct result of the Western River Basin District (WRBD) Project and ESB International recently contracting out the National On-site Wastewater Treatment Study (OSWTS) to the Centre for Freshwater Studies at DkIT. This detailed body of work will feed directly into the Water Framework Directive and river basin catchment plans that will be formulated as part of its implementation. The extended septic tank research at DkIT is being led by Jim O’Donohoe and Dr Valerie McCarthy, both of whom are centrally involved in the National Source Protection Pilot Project. According to Dr Linnane, ‘this extension of the project is yet another step in placing the group water sector and its proactive stance on source protection on the agenda, both nationally and internationally’.
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Inaction ‘not an option’

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