A leading water expert is calling for a complete and immediate ban on boreholes used to fill private swimming pools and water large gardens.

Marco Cremona, a hydrologist and environmental campaigner, said the aquifers were being abused by over 800 private boreholes, which, more often than not, supplied water to swimming pools and gardens.

“Bar the odd exception, all houses in Malta have a connection to the town water supply, so the argument that a borehole is required because there is no town water supply simply does not hold,” the engineer said.

Mr Cremona demanded that the Malta Resources Authority and Resources Minister George Pullicino take immediate action to curb this “blatant” abuse of a public resource or else he would take the matter to the European Commission.

In the consultation report on the National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy, one of the proposals actually recommends: “The government should immediately ban the use of domestic boreholes whose primary use is for recreational purposes, such as swimming pools, lawns and private gardens. Malta cannot afford the extravagant use of a public resource for private gain.”

Mr Cremona, who sits on the committee which prepared the report, argued that the cost incurred to have a private borehole was not justified for average use, which he said amounted to €112.67 a year, “hardly worth the bother of drilling a borehole and registering it”.

“This practice is downright selfish and amounts to theft; people who have a big enough house to fit in a swimming pool should have enough money to afford the cost of filling it,” Mr Cremona argued.

“As things stand, not only do the owners of these boreholes not pay a cent for the thousands of litres they extract every year but the same extraction is to the detriment of the groundwater resource, which helps keep town water affordable to the rest of the population who pay for the small amounts of water they consume.”

Domestic groundwater sources are in fact defined as any groundwater sources located “in a residential tenement and where the groundwater abstracted is used for household purposes, or for the filling of swimming pools, or for irrigation of a domestic garden, or for watering of animals kept as pets but does not include dairies, piggeries, poultry or rabbit farms or any other intensive or commercial uses”.

The engineer said even though the MRA had recently installed meters on some non-domestic boreholes, it was not at all clear whether or when the government planned to meter, let alone charge for, water pumped up from these domestic boreholes.

Legal Notice 241 of 2010 – the Groundwater Abstraction (Metering) Regulations 2010 – stipulates that such boreholes should be metered but there could be an exemption where the water was being extracted from a perched aquifer and “where the abstraction yield from such source does not exceed one cubic metre per day”.

There are two problems with this exemption, according to Mr Cremona: “Firstly, one cubic metre per day is a massive five times the average three-person household’s daily consumption of water. The free allocation of so much water to a small (and, probably, the most affluent) section of the population – to the detriment of the rest – violates the basic principles of social justice in my books.”

Asked what the Resources Ministry’s stance was, a spokesman referred to the legal notice mentioned above. This stipulated that the MRA could permit a domestic borehole to be exempted from metering “where the abstraction yield from such source does not exceed one cubic metre per day”.

Mr Cremona said the government, having the moral and legal obligation to “drastically and immediately reduce extraction to safeguard the resource”, seemed to be more intent to be seen curbing extraction rather than actually curbing it. He added that the 2008 borehole registration exercise and the monitoring of bowser movements had not yet resulted in any measurable reduction in abstraction and, consequently, private abstraction went on unabated.

“As a result, the Water Services Corporation has been forced to reduce its abstraction of free groundwater because the quality of its groundwater production sources has deteriorated to such an extent it is no longer potable even if blended with reverse osmosis water. The result is a continual increase in the unit cost of mains water produced by WSC, which is paid for by law abiding citizens who were not selfish enough to drill an illegal borehole,” Mr Cremona said.