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Water association says private firms taking groundwater for free
“Private sector extracting 40,000 litres of groundwater per minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and this all for free” – Malta Water Association.
The Malta Water Association said it was deeply concerned on the lack of a government policy on the control and metering of private water boreholes.
The MWA, a groupof water professionals formed to increase awareness of water issues in Malta, said that while all boreholes should have been registered by 2010, the Malta Resources Authority (MRA) had now issued letters to 200 registered borehole owners to close them.
“There are presently 7,800 registered boreholes. Only 109 of these have been metered. Still, it is clear that the extraction of groundwater by private consumers today exceeds the level being extracted by the Water Services Consumption. The private sector is presently extracting 40,000 litres of groundwater per minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and this all for free,” the MWA said.
The MWA said the situation was alarming and called for the immediate closure of all non-agricultural boreholes, and the metering of agricultural boreholes by 2012 to fine-tune estimates for agricultural water demand.
“It is public knowledge that groundwater has for the past years been exploited well beyond sustainable levels of extraction… The MWA is deeply concerned about such over-exploitation of free groundwater for commercial purposes, and the matter is clearly not being given urgent attention by government.”
The MWA also recommended that the government invests in polishing plants at all three waste-water treatment plants, aiming to achieve 5 million cubic metres of polished effluent per year by 2015, increasing to 15-20 million cubic metres per year in the long term
It also called for the investment into Treated Sewage Effluent (TSE) infrastructure, comprising of a number of regional distribution reservoirs that would service agricultural water demand, and against a fee to service industrial, commercial and landscaping water demand.
The MWA said Malta needed a national agricultural policy to establish irrigation requirements, apart from a water policy.
“Malta’s groundwater is a precious, scarce and finite public resource. It is in need of urgent sustainable management, because the price of its abuse is borne by the present and future generations,” the MWA said.
The Water Services Corporation (WSC) is the public entity responsible to provide potable water to consumers. Groundwater is generally less expensive to extract than the energy-hungry desalination of sea water by Reverse Osmosis. READ MORE: Borehole driller gets environmental award
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After reading this article and other articles on different news mediums, my question is, where does the MWA get these figures from: "The private sector is presently extracting 40,000 litres of groundwater per minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year" if only 109 boreholes are metered or is this an exagerated asumption to alarm Malta? I am sure that we consume less water in the winter than we do in the summer.
Maybe the facts need to be re-evaluated?
Before someone decides to comment against me, let me make it clear that I Do Not own a bore-hole, it's just I cannot stand that anything that is good and possibly free or cheap, the government and other monopolies want to tax it or take other sources of income from it.
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So we have something that is still free and the MWA wants us to pay for it. This water is a gift from nature, why should we pay for it?? Soon we will pay for rain or what??
Is the WSC loosing profits?
