16 May Welcome to safewater.ie

With the water tax arriving soon and Irish Water meters being installed, isn’t it time to find out exactly what the quality of your drinking water is?

Check out these rather scary facts:

1. 90% of Irish Water is chlorinated. That’s the water you are drinking and washing your family in. Drinking water treated with chlorine is associated with higher levels of birth defects, in particular spina bifida, a fault in spinal cord development which shatters the lives of seven babies born here every month.

2. Cancer-causing chemicals in Irish drinking water increased by 60% between 2008 and 2009, according to the latest Report from the Environmental Protection Agency.

3. The number of public water supplies found with dangerous levels of ‘trihalomethanes’ [THMs] – which result in increased cancer risks – shot up from 4.0% in 2008 to 16.1% in 2009. this means that 16 per cent of water supplies now fail the safe limits set by the World Health Organisation for THMs. For public group water schemes the figure is much higher with 31% of supplies exceeding the WHO limits. Prolonged consumption of drinking water with high THM levels has been linked to diseases of the liver, kidneys, bladder, as well as the central nervous system, and with increasing the risk of cancer. A small risk exists for THM exposure via inhalation.

4. 7% of Irish drinking water arrives to your home through lead pipes. If your home was built in the 1970’s the EPA advises you test your drinking water. A total of 14 supplies reported lead exceedances during 2012 (13 in 2011); however, 41 supplies have reported levels of lead in excess of the 2013 parametric value of 10 µg/l (42 in 2011). The majority of these are public water supplies.

5. An average of 20,000 homeowners around the country are under long term boil water notices.

This information was compiled through a simple google search on Irish drinking water quality. These numbers are not made up, and are a little scary. Considering that Irish Water are installing water meters across the country and are set to charge everyone for their water supply, should we have to pay for water that is not fit for human consumption?

I set up www.safewater.ie to offer you a cheaper alternative than sending off your water to be tested, giving faster results (15 minutes, except for bacteria, which is overnight) and the ability to upload your results to our user survey, which we will turn into a shared crowd sourced document.

Want to know how your county faired in drinking water quality late last year? Download the epa’s list here and see for yourself: http://www.epa.ie/pubs/reports/water/drinking/q3of2013ral.html#.U3Xina1dU7M
Read up on the epa’s 2012 report here: http://www.epa.ie/pubs/reports/water/drinking/Drinking%20Water%202012_web.pdf

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