In the Republic they are freely admitting that they have been, to some extent, paying the price for a lack of investment in upgrading & repairing the Victorian mains, concentrating instead on providing supply to all the new housing developments & putting rural areas on to the mains. I don’t suppose there will be too much hope of rectifying the problem through investment in the near term future.
Politicians in the North have not risen in my estimation after the way they dumped the blame on to the officials of the water company. All parties have been pandering to their electorate’s view that they should not have to pay for water which just falls freely from the sky – a view which we used to hear often enough on this side of St George's Channel. I expect that they too are suffering from long neglect of necessary upgrades & replacement – apart from financial considerations any wide scale programme of digging up the roads must surely have posed a security nightmare during the Troubles.
I for one take back all the rude comments I ever made about the water companies digging up our roads & causing traffic jams again.
On Tuesday Paul Simons told terrifying stories of the winter of 1947 in his Weather Eye column. England suffered burst pipes on the same sort of scale as has been happening in Ireland: London firemen dealt with nearly 1,500 flood calls over a single weekend; when the thaw turned back into a freeze bonfires had to be lit in the streets to keep the standpipes from freezing. Emergency workmen in Devon had icicles hanging from their ears & eyebrows.
Gas pipes fractured too, killing at least five people inside their own homes.
Thank heavens for modern plastic pipes.
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Drainage problems
Drainage problems
