CORK CITY Council is to seek over €20 million in funding from the Department of the Environment to carry out improvement works to the city’s water supply following flooding which left over 50,000 people without water.
Cork city manager Joe Gavin has made a number of recommendations on foot of last month’s flooding, when the city’s main pumping station at the Lee Road became submerged, leaving 18,000 households without water.
Mr Gavin said the council would seek €18 million from the Department of the Environment to carry out proposed upgrading works at the Lee Road plant, including the raising of the plant room to a higher level to guard against future flooding.
Mr Gavin said the water supply in the city was sourced from two separate plants which had their own separate distribution networks. These were not interlinked, so if one failed, there was no provision to divert water from the second plant to affected areas.
He said Cork City Council should give a higher priority than previously to linking the Lee Road pumping station and the Inniscarra pumping station by bringing a mains pipe from the Wilton Road Roundabout to the Lee Road Waterworks Plant. Mr Gavin said such an interlink – which would cost around €3 million – would not have made any difference to the recent flooding because the Lee Road plant was under water, but it would give better security in any future emergencies.
Cork City Council will also be seeking €2 million in funding from the Department of the Environment to carry out repairs of breaches in the quay walls at Grenville Place near the Mercy University Hospital and Sunday’s Well Road. Mr Gavin said the collapse of the quay wall at Grenville Place occurred when water flowed down the Mardyke, leaving water on the roadside higher than in the river and knocking down the wall so it could flow into the river channel.
The Lord Mayor of Cork, Cllr Dara Murphy, said he had written to the ESB requesting it to forward to the council the report it is preparing on their handling of the Lee valley flooding for Minister for the Environment John Gormley. ESB chief executive Padraig McManus yesterday defended the company’s decision to release water from Inniscarra Dam at a rate of 535 cubic metres per second on November 19th.
Several Cork city councillors were critical of the ESB’s handling of the floods, noting it had warned at 5pm that it was going to discharge water at 300 cubic metres per second, but ended up discharging almost twice this.
Mr McManus told RTÉ's News at Oneyesterday the ESB's responsibility when discharging water from Inniscarra and other dams was to notify the emergency services that there was a serious flood occurring, which it did."There was no ambiguity whatsoever in the warnings we gave; it meant serious floods for Cork."