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The quality of the island’s water continues to be of a high standard according to Guernsey Water’s Water Quality Report for 2016.
The quality of the water supplied was excellent with 99.91% of 6,866 tests meeting all UK and European Union standards compared with 99.84% in 2015.
Tests were taken from Guernsey Water’s three operational treatment works, three service reservoirs, water tower and customers’ taps in two water supply zones and each of the three key performance targets were reached (99.5% at water treatment works, 99% at service reservoirs and 99% at customer taps).
There were no water breaches at Longue Hougue, Kings Mills or St Saviours water treatment works and measures to improve bacterial quality of the island’s service reservoirs had a continuing positive effect with 100% compliance recorded at the reservoirs and the water tower for the second year running.
Guernsey Water’s Water Quality Risk Manager, Margaret McGuinness, said: “Protecting public health with clean, fresh, wholesome drinking water is vitally important to our island and we are particularly pleased to see that our expertise, vigilance and constant monitoring has yielded such an excellent result for 2016.
“Our success is due to the collective technical expertise of our staff who cover all aspects of the science and engineering of the public water supply.”
Customer tap samples had six failures in total in the year and four were for falling outside bacterial standards and two were for Trihalomethane (disinfection by-products) failures.
The number of water quality enquiries from customers in 2016 reduced to 114 from 226 in 2015. The enquiries which related to an earthy/musty water taste (due to seasonal algae issues at water storage reservoirs) dropped to 28 in 2016 compared to 139 in 2015.
“While it is a small number of occasions where water quality does not meet the high standards we expect, and our customers deserve, we will continue to investigate and strive to eliminate these to further improve the quality of Guernsey’s public drinking water supplies,” Mrs McGuinness said.
