‘Close down all private boreholes’

All private boreholes must be closed down to avoid over-extraction and the exhaustion of groundwater, the Malta Water Association warned yesterday.

“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,” said the MWA’s secretary general, engineer Marco Cremona.

The Resources and Rural Affairs Ministry confirmed that “all calculations show that more water is being extracted than should be,” but that “we still do not have a real picture of what is really being extracted”.

This, it said, was the reason the government was metering boreholes.

The MWA proposed that all non-agricultural boreholes should be closed, and said that “although the ensuing shift from free borehole water to Water Services Corporation water may result in a decrease in profits on the part of heavy borehole water consumers, such as bottling companies and laundries, this would not drive these sectors into bankruptcy”.

“All groundwater is public, not private,” Mr Cremona said.

An exception was being made for agriculture, Mr Cremona said, because water was essential to it and apart from having an economic dimension it also had an environmental role to play.

Mr Cremona said it was not yet clear whether the government was trying to close off or meter boreholes. Despite the government promising to meter all boreholes, only 109 commercial boreholes out of the 7,800 registered had been metered so far – a “mere 1.4 per cent”.

In May, the Malta Resources Authority sent out closure notices on boreholes in private homes, Mr Cremona said, adding it was not clear whether the government was moving towards metering groundwater extraction or stopping it outright.

The MWA also proposed that all agricultural boreholes should be metered by the end of 2012, followed by a year-long monitoring programme to establish the needs of agriculture.

It also suggests that wastewater treated should be filtered to be used as second class water in agriculture rather than be dumped at sea, pointing out that this could make available five million cubic metres a year by 2015, and 15-20 million cubic metres a year “in the long term”. This, along with an educational drive for farmers to conserve water, could also reduce stress on groundwater extraction.

Groundwater, Mr Cremona said, also had a strategic role as in case the reverse osmosis plants stopped working because of an extended power outage or an oil spill to the east of Malta, the country would have to rely on groundwater only.

When confronted with the fact that recycled water was found to be too salty to be used in agriculture, Mr Cremona said the problem had to either be addressed at source and see whether people were still using seawater to flush, or else invest in more treatment.

He said that considering the government had spent €110 million to clean wastewater, the additional €15 million investment it would require to polish it for use was not too much.

This would go along with a treated sewage effluent infrastructure where reservoirs would distribute water to agriculture for free and to industry against a charge.

In its reaction, the ministry said it had noted the MWA’s proposals but pointed out that in past years the government had worked to make water a sustainable resource.

The ministry said it had introduced a moratorium on new boreholes and made licences obligatory for those operating bowsers, along with making metering compulsory.

It said the ministry’s paying agency had invited farmers to register their borehole with the MRA so they could be given a meter for free, which would be installed after commercial boreholes were metered.

The ministry also pointed out that after major infrastructural works, the WSC was extracting less groundwater because there were less leakages.

It did not, however, reply to the question asking for the target date to have all boreholes metered.