The Story of Water | Full Documentary | Irish Water

[Music] [Music] water it's the essence of all life we are made of it it sustains us it's part of who we are and yet every day we take it for granted our most precious natural resource is under threat like never before water supply and quality is becoming a ever bigger issue in the run we're going to be looking at fresh clean water as nearly the oil of the future the water supply in Dublin is operating really on a knife edge at the moment a statistics about Dublin don't sound like a developed world city half the water Dublin cleans and supplies every day the leaks away before it reaches a customer your kids went home and not wanting to have showers and that's because they were too nervous at the bottoms when I'm 18 sick there are places in the country where if you flush the toilet it goes into that pipe that goes straight I've just seen who needs proper sewage treatment fence I mean even now you have to have war end of story [Music] [Applause] [Music] every drop of water has been through a plant or an animal or cloud many times it may cover 71% of our planet's surface but less than 1% of it is usable by humans and it's under threat to drought pollution and climate change things that aren't limited to deserts of developing countries in the developed world where we don't pay attention to water there is water illiteracy we have no idea what's required to get the water if you live in parts of India if you live in Bangladesh if you have to walk to get your water every day you understand the cost of water and the value of water it's those of us who have it as a instantaneous resource all the time who don't really understand in Ireland our temperate rainy climate means that water is rarely in short supply our island is green because historically it has always been wet [Music] these days no one would consider drinking raw untreated water but a hundred and sixty years ago that's exactly what Dubliners did [Music] in the early years of the 19th century the population of Dublin grew rapidly and the city at the time was spread wash from the canals the child mortality rate was an enormous problem the average life expectancy in Dublin City was about 46 years and most of that was down to water related illness the provision of safe drinking water had a massive effect on public health forced major public water supply for Dublin was developed and brought into the city from the Devourer tree [Music] the water here comes from glacial mountains its PT soil it's acidic soil and comes through granite rock that would be aggressive to the pipes and over decades those pipes deteriorate most of metal that was built up over the years in towns and cities and country areas [Music] Balamory uses water treatment plant was set up in the nineteen thirties juice about fifty five to sixty percent of the demand for the Greater Dublin area reservoir area itself is about five thousand acres so would have been in householders living in within that area so they all had to vacate their houses and those houses are currently under water a pune Fuko reservoir water is filtered and disinfected at the treatment plant then piped to an open reservoir at still organ before reaching homes and businesses the water comes here for storage before going into Dublin city as it leaves the site here it gets real ornated and we also treated with ultraviolet light but we do need to keep the birds off the water so we have a falconer that comes in every day and that essentially keeps the birds at bay and just to maintain the water quality [Music] by 2022 the reservoir will be replaced by a new covered water storage facility the water network it's like your blood circulation system transporting everyday 1.7 billion litres of water from the treatment plants all over the country right to customers tat samples are taken every day both of their all offer and final water certain basic physical problems are measured temperature color turbidity which is measured the clarity of the water but the probably the most important are the bacteriological tests failure is anything above zero so if there's one bad bug in the water that's too many we need to make people understand that the water that they want to use needs to be protected the fate of our inland waters really depends largely on the way that we treat them and look after them and we have to think about what is in the catchment and who we are sharing the catchment with we're there to look after the river where the custodians of the river to protect it for the fish the animals if they're alive and doing well in the river you know you've got a healthy river clean water it's incumbent as all of us to protect that and keep it for the future most modern land management is leaky it leaks nutrients because more than what nature can cope it is applied to maximize production you can see that fertilizers and spreading of slurry and use of cheap tips and point all these things are necessary then my knowledge have been done in a way that was sensitive to our water courses and what they mean to us Cryptosporidium it's a tiny protozoa and it's actually a one-celled animal that can occur in both animal and human waste and following flooding you can get issues with drinking water and drinking water systems where you actually have a public health problem there Cryptosporidium is a bacterium that causes infection of the stomach and bowel it can also affect the lungs it's highly resistant to chlorine but vulnerable to a much simpler form of treatment heat or water notice is primarily used when a water supply has contaminated what it does is that it compensates for fact that the treatment process hasn't worked isn't working and so what you do if you boil the water it destroys the bacteria it destroys the parasite it's constant thing that I have to think about from seven o'clock in the morning to tender hibernate trying to make sure the kids don't drink water at when they're in the shower in the bat it's very hard especially with a four year old trying to convince himself on the water in his mouth first thing in the morning is bushing a t27 to fill bottles of water and then coming home again drinks for a dinner boiling water for washing salads constant it's a luxury to be able to when you're buying the water to know you're doing the right thing and you're not going to be sick offers but it's that luxury there for everybody I do wonder sometimes he's a few wishes as well in February when I came out around the school few kids were coming home and not wanting to have showers and that's because they were too nervous that the water was gonna make them sick not just drinking it they were afraid to touch it at all all we have here at this treatment plant is coronation and fluoridation the necessary barriers that is needed to protect against Cryptosporidium just isn't the right of here we are looking to provide a four log barrier which essentially means 99.99% removal of Cryptosporidium at the moment we have zero protection here they did say it may be just for a few weeks and wood reviewers but it has been continuously ruined reviewed since then [Music] [Music] inisheer six miles off the Gold Coast is the smallest of the three Aran Islands for its 260 residents water shortages have become a part of daily life the Islanders they're self-sufficient the appreciate the value of water conservation because it has a knock-on positive benefit for themselves you know they don't have a test go down the road but they can go and just buy buttons of order the island of inisheer is gradually moving into the 20th century at the moment the Islanders are digging trenches through the sheer rock in order to lay pipes for their first ever piped water supply we've had a couple as Haines Arsena Gila iv6 on open our nahi lanka's Netanya I just found suffered an arch Stoick Russia River on neridah VNC mikedolan keen nahele and architecture gourmet you know King for Nong Khai John Murdoch Tala kena Edmonton hidden is a v8 motor the preacher algis logically Gaskell agus again after the turn or Thompson ear internatinal Alicia aren't you you ain't currently tractor start washing [Music] instead and so when churches Yamaguchi Kangana Hillen are in the seer X imaginary univariant Sarah dog Chapman Hall slow spirit are see lack of awareness which I fall back on is nice talk this morning on Athena century I was she's our scholarly so nice movie it's miss mooshka all saturation [Music] old commercial started down in rings and I stood all the other globes my brother was already here coxy and that's how I came up a few years later and always there's the that's Emma doesn't song is one of the senior championship world and in his paradigm called that's where the chance was we have have to say the happy moments when the crew of his coaching warm the place is alive [Music] the bridge exploit ordinates long once you go under and you know it reoccurs you can hear the touches you know taking the water and finishing have to joke joke joke [Music] the River Liffey supplies 85% of Dublin's water about 40% of the rivers flow is purified and pumped to consumers taps the problem is in recent years demand is outgoing or the river can supply one of the things that's that's a really sad and disappointing indicator of how bad things are in Dublin is that this summer they reduced the water pressure to their customers overnight to save water that's not a developed world solution we have just about enough water to supply homes and businesses every single day so it's not really a safe or a sustainable position to say to people look there's a 5% risk or a 10% risk that water is going to come out of your tap every day in the east of the country there's less rainfall and therefore the water sources naturally have are less abundant or have less water in them the amount of water we take is at the maximum we can abstract before we start impacting greatly on the natural environment we identified the fact that the River Shannon was ultimately the most sustainable and economic source for these to the Midlands region of Ireland and particularly taking it from the lower point of the river Shannon just above the hydropower plant around Russia we know that by taking two percent of the average flow in the river Shannon we can cater for the needs of the Midlands and the eastern region of Ireland it's about trying to ensure that people have a resilient supply that they're not afraid that when they turn on the tap they're not going to have any water and to support the growth of Dublin and the contrary into the next 50 years sourcing additional water supplies is a priority for our nation a conserving our treated water is also essential every day clean drinking water drains out of the network through thousands of leaks the water system is invisible it's not just the water that is taken for granted it's all the work necessary to get people the water [Music] we are losing about 43 percent of the water that we produced a leakage which is at a minimum twice as high as it should be if you're treating that water to drinkable levels and then it's going and then going out into the ground that's a treatment cost that's chemical cost water is heavy so you're pumping water all over the place if you're pumping 50 percent of the water into the ground that's absolutely cash being thrown out the window imagine if half the guiness that God brewed was thrown in the drain before you could put it in a bottle people would say that's crazy and Great Britain and Ireland the United States particularly the East Coast the older cities you have the same problem which is really old systems delivering and in water mains they're under pressure of course so if there's air crack or a leak that water is shooting out of the pipe when we built these water systems to move water around and distribute water to our homes we probably didn't think enough about the long term maintenance of the pipes Arden's water pipe network was first installed over a hundred and fifty years ago despite decades of repair and replacement much of it is still corroded cracked and leaking we have found leaks in the past that are in very very small holes in the pipe work and they can create leaks losing up to twenty thirty thousand litres of water per day water meters tell you where the water is being used and so if the standard amount is being used over here and then we go another half a kilometre and suddenly a lot of water is being used but there's nothing there but more homes then guess what in the middle there's a leak the reality is that once we put pipes in the ground and burying them it's hard to find them when they leak and when they do leak it's really inconvenient to dig them up very often to liaise with the local authority to agree it's a type of traffic management we need to do the biggest challenge is actually when you dig down was to pinpoint exactly where the problem is we start by using acoustics most basic is a listening stick which is a steel rod it's the the old-school way of finding leaks we listen to thousand fittings around the network and anything that's making a noise we follow up then in that area and bring in more leak pinpointing equipment [Music] you fix a leak and then it finds the next weakest point on the network and it pops again so that's quite frustrating it can be kind of an ongoing a domino effect where you will you could fix five or six weeks and you'll have no drop in usage whatsoever we need to repair a thousand leagues a month on us just to stand still so even if we double the budget that we have or we double the amount of teams on the ground you know it's going to take years but you just have to stick at it the only time I can imagine going after every leak is if you're in a terrible water scarcity problem in which case every drops value goes so high if you hit those moments where the those some of these occasions are so expensive to fix that the cost-benefit analysis is way out of whack I would go to the rate payer and say I hate having a leak but it's I'd rather not use your money that way if we're going back and we're patching up a pipe and the same rolled day in day out that makes no sense it's costing us too much money it's disrupting the public too much and it makes more sense to replace that pipe [Music] Ireland's coastline monumental spectacular unique shaped by millions of years of rainfall and erosion it's a national treasure but one the hidden story [Music] there are 38 locations around the country that raw sewage is being discharged into the environment and that covers the wastewater from about 88,000 people so it's very significant there has been a reduction in the number of discharges we know that it'll be 2021 by the time most of them are done we historically believed you could just put the waste into the rivers into the sea and it wasn't a problem all wastes should be treated before it's put back into the sea I was born and reared here in this village it was a sleepy little village with a beautiful coastline so pure so perfect it was where we swam it's where we fished you have main sewage pipe running through the main street under scanner and then it was coming to a small holding tank just at the edge of the sea and due to many many people visiting the area the holding tank couldn't hold horses all so it backed up and not only had you in Main Street coming out of the manholes but also there was a hole in the pipe between the holding tank and the sea that actually caused a geezer of human experience to rise up three officials came out from the County Council and it blew into the air 22 feet that shows you the pollution the pressure that's going into the bay all the time I have a lot of friends who were a surfer so one of them was really sick at the time and he wasn't sure why and then I kind of joined the dots and was like wow this is actually a really serious issue bluntly speaking people were swimming in sewage they do ingest it and they do get those diseases we would see a number of people on a regular basis who do come in with infectious illnesses related to the stomach and small bile and frequent able to see ear infections as well I surfed actually behind a pier in the scanner it's a storm wave there and just that night I spent like 12 hours in my toilet sick my doctor our game confirmed two days later that I had a cold a poison I didn't even realize it was raw sewage running into water there and it's just not it's just not on fifteen hundred we Gibbons of raw sewage has been discharged into the scanner Bay twice a day every single day so this is an a problem for the health of the marine environment also for swimmers and surfers it's lighted in the determine and we ensure in the future that list cannot be returns to what I remember as a child and how beautiful it was [Music] Cork harbour at the mouth of the River Lea has been a thriving port for centuries [Music] Kove was the last port of call for the RMS Titanic before I set out across the Atlantic on its doomed maiden voyage [Music] this was the natural position for a transatlantic liners so all of the transatlantic liners between Liverpool in New York or Southampton New York stop take over Harbor is reported to be the second most beautiful natural harbour in the world but it's well known that the effluent raw effluent is is going into the harbor [Music] when you're training long distance you're swimming head down you know you might feed every hour that's the only time you talk to people it can be cold I'm assuming in the winter certainly is definitely cold but it makes of your life in a way that school never does I moved cold but a year and a half ago and and I bought my house because I can see the water right from my bedroom window the day I actually went to view my house there was a seal that I saw from the window and that just absolutely made up my mind that yeah this is the place for me right below my bedroom window there's a sewage pipe and as of now there is actually sewage going out into the water through that pipe and I just I can't swim there [Music] if there's magic on this earth that's contained in water you know after going for a long swim of the scene your body feels just fantastic but you realize then after a while that your mind feels so much better as well there's just something magic about it I think it would be fantastic that people didn't need to have this knowledge of where the outfall pipes are if people could just go and say there's nice water I wonder what it's like to swim there I'm gonna go in for a swim so a very simple solution to this is gather up the sewage and then pump it to a treatment plants and discharge it to see so what we did was we built it in Reverse we built the treatment plan first so that there was always somewhere for the sewage to go and then using it drilled crossing to go under the s3 like really deep 30 meters deep under the s3 so that we can bring the sewage from here over to the treatment plant in Shan Valley we'd have gone from having an equivalent of the amount of sewage that would fill 40,000 wheelie bins at the start and we'll have that down to zero so it'll take about two years for the harbor to regenerate but you're going to start seeing an immediate difference in things like sewage leisure because it's not going to be going station to the harbor anymore I just love getting up in the morning watching the Sun going up when I move my board hauling pots i I just love it I have some memories we literally were able to go in to water and kick the fish of the strand compare that to this year and it's the worst here anybody has ever witnessed baby wipes they're having a huge huge impact people are flushing them and they're almost indestructible and he ropes their own water like they have hands you know that if they touch a rope they run to it and you have to actually tear them off it plastic is our greatest friend but our greatest enemy it's it's almost indestructible if you don't plastic it's it's steer for certainly not longer and you're going to live [Music] it's normal that if people find a dead way you they are gonna report a dead dolphin but if they find the Seavers they think it's so common that they don't report it and then we have all these birds dying and no one knows why so I look at all the measurements and try to infer the cause of death I look at the Oregon Health of these birds and try to find out why they died so you have a big piece of plastic here broken down from something bigger [Music] the same way that plastic bags reminds of prey like jellyfish baby wipes could remind them of other type of prey they could get confused thinking baby wipes or wipes floating at sea would be other types of prey and these wipes most of them even though they look like a natural fabric they are actually made of fibers of plastic so they are definitely becoming accessible for birds or other wildlife to ingest [Music] if people want to use baby wipes and put them into the rubbish bin you know don't don't flush them down the loo same with the cotton buds I see that everywhere until something on a higher level is done in relation to plastics and and all that stuff and all the other problems that we have then this is as much as we can do if you think about it if you pick up a piece of plastic and put it into a bag and bring it home that's a bit of plastic that it's not going to end up in the sea and maybe that's a bit of plastic that's going to get caught in a bird's beak [Music] it was designed for 1.64 million population equivalent and what's actually coming in the door at the moment is about 1.9 million population equivalent so it is it is really working very hard to treat the the sewage that is coming in brings end treatment plant processes 40% of the country's public wastewater here debris fats oil and grease are removed from the wastewater before undergoing treatment once the solid waste left behind was simply disposed of these days it's become a valuable asset a material that remains in the waste water that is no longer a waste may forms lodges and these can be digested on the works creating valuable fertilizer and creating gas through the digestion process that can create up to four megawatts of power from burning up biogas so that's as much power as maybe will power a small to medium-sized town in Ireland with the plant operating at 16% of a capacity some nutrients in the incoming sewage are passing through the process the solution is a major upgrade to increase the plant's capacity on a phased basis from now until 2025 when we have this built it will certainly improve the quality of the affluent coming out there has been historical under investment in our in our drinking water and our wastewater infrastructure over the years so we're playing catch-up really are a long period of underinvestment is part of a system so when we look at challenges our country is facing and you look at things like housing supply you can't invest in one area and not be cognizant of the level of investment that you need to make in other areas like transport and water and electricity massive investments required in water and wastewater treatment so our key function really is to drive inefficient to costs out while at the same time is to protect the public interest [Music] how hard and manages its wastewater is often dictated by the live the land flat plains hilly ground coastal terrain each area requires its own unique solution sometimes treating wastewater relies in advanced technology other times nature itself can be harnessed to do the job wherever water slows down on its journey to the sea a wetland may form [Music] how these systems work is nicely demonstrated by looking at a small wetland system for an effluence from a single house the water comes from the house to a collection point and then flows to the first cell then flows to the next cell transpiration from the plants reduces the water quantity here in County Waterford a constructed wetlands treats all the wastewater from the local village of Dunhill self-sustaining system so does need any electricity and are any pumping and there's no moving parts so it's very low in maintenance benefits community is it's keeping their river clean that's the main benefit and also has the add-on benefit of being beautiful a natural environment [Music] historically Ireland's climate has been defined by mild weather plenty of rainfall and an absence of extreme temperatures but with climate change the future of a reliable water supply is less certain in recent years water restrictions have become a reality which can be hard for people to understand in one of the wettest countries in Europe there's been this remarkable wave of stories about all these incredible wonderful archaeological discoveries in Ireland because the ground is so dry that you can see ancient settlements we enjoy reading about those discoveries and the archaeologists are delighted but again there's a message there and the message is maybe Ireland is changing [Music] there were two storms in quick succession Emma and Ophelia and what we found is that there was this massive freeze event so a lot of our pipes burst and that meant that loads of people were out of water and then when we tried to get the water back to people because it was out for a while we had airlocks which means the water physically couldn't get through the pipe when we think about past climate variability and even indeed future climate change that will affect the availability of water resources so it's crucial that we build the resilience of water supply systems and building the resilience resilience essentially means being able to to maintain function during extreme events currently the water level in the lake is quite low and this is a result of the very good summer we had and the lack of rainfall over the whole summer period the doctor summer was quite severe and quite prolonged went on for seven or eight weeks really you know the cows children to trot whether a drink between sixty and a hundred liters at a each if you don't have it at some it's a big problem when I growing up we had no running water we had to go water from the bone and bring it up on a horse and cart and give it a cat it some of my friends and have had wells maybe older wells that were shallow 70 80 feet and they've gone dry with the water table been so low after the drought and the born he wants to get her supply up and running again the water temperature went much higher than it would normally 18 degrees would be a maximum summer temperature normally but this year in the black water it was 24 degrees in places and getting up to that temperature salmon and trout I can't even breathe under the water there's so little oxygen the general trend is that the wet places become wetter and the dry places become drier adding on top of that places that are struggling now to have enough water are gonna find that's a little more challenging and places that are struggling with too much water from storms are likely to experience more severe storms that are gonna tax their ability to prevent floods water is the fire of life and without water we can't have life so it's be holding on us to have water of quality and in quantity to sustain our existence water supply and quality is becoming a bigger issue in the world there are lots of companies that have started to take too seriously because they see water as a risk a risk to their ability to do business and to deliver the products that their customers want [Music] well did you know that there are some people who pulled the wrong things down the toilet there are some silly Billy's okay forget it Green Schools is an environmental education program and it's international we run water workshops it's about the students doing all the work and really trying to empower themselves and then to spread the message back into their schools and into their homes people in unlike places like Africa I mean they then like have to go and collect their water and it's driving that nice right hands there to get from go wherever and it's like and sometimes all mucky and stuff so you wouldn't like want to taste it all the way but if you wanted to survive you just have to go at it you might spend two euros 50 on a bottle of water which is one leisure you know so you assign a value to us because you're putting you're willing to pay two year is 50 for us and it's well worth it because then you drink it you're not thirsty so you have an immediate impact of that two year is 50 but when you're at home and you're not thinking with that head on it seems more disposable [Music] [Music] [Music] not to run the taps for drinks just to take the first drink through the tap short showers that's another one not too long in the shower that's for dad as well what's your favorite phrase about the toilet yeah this yellow let it Mellow as it's brown flush it down [Music] humans are naturally drawn to water and to the ocean it's a source of well-being calming and energizing I'm over 60 like still you get butterflies in my stomach and I'm going I was gonna be like just when you rave and then see you at scandal wow does has kind of given a lot of hope to a lot of surfers now right area because they realize they can keep doing it for a long time to come and he's still surfing probably better than quite a few people like the water so it's just a complete lifelong passion for him and it's something that he said passed on to us as well we always have had the sea connection and for me my father's always been emphasizing the importance that that's the school of life we met really through the ocean when the girls were born the ocean was just a part of all of our lives like everything around here is about water [Music] a lot of people have been running with the blue flag you could go to a blue flag beach anywhere around the world but with the green coast award because we realized in Ireland we have so many stunning rural beaches that if we were to put that infrastructure in would be destroyed but also deserve to be celebrated because they are such accident water quality and so well of doctor [Music] I mean the evidence does show it has a profound psychological effect as well as physical when we're in the sea which is perhaps no surprise I mean as human beings we have I feel that innate connection with water it's how we we first experience life in the womb that feeling of being suspended not having to fight gravity anymore and that memory exists in all of us by 2050 the UN predicts that around half the world's population will suffer from clean water scarcity our future and the future of the water we use are inextricably linked securing them both will require more than just investment what we need is awareness and a new respect for a precious resource we've taken for granted far too long majority people all they do is open it happened to have war they don't for your language like her valuable it is we don't look after our water resources we will pay for it in our health and well-being we've certainly got enough smart people but we need to be realistic about what's happening and to change there's no one single bullish in terms of a solution it's about a combination of measures we can ask as engineers decide that we're going to impose a solution and the best projects and ones that have had the the best delivery are the ones really who've worked with the community the imagination that people have the technologies that have developed and the will to solve this problem if we continuously see the opportunity to improve we're going to move to a better place it's an ongoing process but I believe that it will happen there's a huge opportunity and somewhere like Ireland to shift our awareness and perspective on how we value how important water is in our everyday lives [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Irish Water Uisce Eireann

Views: 38,679

Rating: 4.7408209 out of 5

Keywords: water treatment, wastewater treatment, irish water, uisce eireann, water network, story of water, ireland's water, boil water notice, documentary, drinking water, water quality, water conservation, save water, use less water

Id: Ie0iFaL6Nqw

Length: 45min 40sec (2740 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2020