Cheers! Guernsey Water ranked as excellent again

Tuesday 18 September 2018

Guernsey's only water supplier has received some excellent results from its latest quality tests, with just ten fails out of all of the tests carried out throughout 2017.

Despite a slight decrease on results from the year before, Guernsey Water said it achieved a "100% compliance" ranking in last year's water quality targets following assessments carried out at the island's service reservoirs.

The utility firm said that means for a fourth year running the quality of water supplied was "excellent" with "99.85 per cent of 7,821 tests meeting all the UK and European Union standards."

Margaret McGuinness, Water Quality Risk Manager of Guernsey Water said: “The achievement of such a high compliance figure is due to the collective technical expertise of our staff that covers all aspects of the science and engineering of the public water supply.” 

Pictured: The testing kit used by Guernsey Water 

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 per cent compliance for maximum admissible concentrations at water treatment works, 99 per cent at service reservoirs and 99 per cent at customer taps). 

Guernsey Water also said that although this shows an "extremely small decrease in compliance compared to the 2016 figure", last year there were no breaches at St Saviours water treatment works with just one failure each at Kings Mills and Longue Hougue. Both were fully investigated and actions were taken to minimise any reoccurrence. 

Pictured: St Saviour's reservoir 

Last year customer tap samples had 10 failures; three were for falling outside bacterial standards and seven were for Trihalomethane (disinfection by-products) failures. 

The number of water quality enquiries from customers increased to 126 from 114 the previous year. Enquiries relating to the earthy/musty water taste (due to seasonal algae issues at the water storage reservoirs) rose to 30 in 2017 compared to 28 in 2016 but the utility said this is still a notable decrease since 2015 which saw 139 enquiries. 

Mrs McGuinness said: “We continue to provide safe, high quality drinking water to our customers. There are a small number of occasions where water quality does not meet the high standard we expect and our customers deserve and we will continue to investigate and strive to eliminate these to further improve the quality of Guernsey’s public drinking water supplies. 

“Safe, clean drinking water is vital to public health and the wellbeing of our island. This is ever more important in the face of significant challenges to drinking water supplies from the impacts of climate change on the quality and availability of water resources. It is essential that good quality drinking water, and the investment by Guernsey Water necessary to achieve it, is maintained in the future.” 

A full copy of the Water Quality Report for 2017 can be found here.