My colleague, Philip Grech, penned a very pertinent article titled ‘Flood relief and reality’ in Times of Malta (September 29, 2014). I was not at all relieved by what he had to say.

The office where I work is situated in Main Street corner with St Francis Street, Balzan. When it is raining in the locality, Birkirkara included, it is no joke to make my way to the office, if and when I find a parking place. When he mentioned overflowing sewage from surcharged manholes, what he meant was that the manhole covers are pushed upwards by the liquid in the sewer.

It is quite a sight, believe me, to see raw sewage, mixed with rainwater, flowing out at an appreciable rate and joining the rainwater already flowing in the streets. One simply cannot cross the streets in ordinary shoes; you have to wear boots, which I do.

I keep my umbrella open on the street side to protect myself from being splashed with the manhole outflow by the ever courteous drivers enjoying their ride through little Venice; I’d rather have my head wet than risk getting contaminated by sewage – health authorities please note.

The tunnels will end up receiving not only rainwater, as is planned, but raw sewage as well

Needless to say these half-open manholes are a real traffic hazard and, if I remember correctly, a few years back a car got stuck in one of them at Qormi. The car owner had sued the authorities and was eventually awarded damages by the law courts.

As Perit Grech pointed out, the rainwater finds itself in the public sewer because of the many illegal connections to the sewer made from backyards and building roof tops. This is a well known fact but the powers that be do not do anything about it. They build tunnels instead, which will end up receiving not only rainwater, as is planned, but raw sewage as well.

So how will they store the rainwater in underground reservoirs when it is mixed with sewage? The tunnel will certainly help but why has the situation been allowed to deteriorate to an extent where draconian measures have to be taken, with no guarantee of a watertight solution (please forgive punning).

The illegal connections do not only create a public health hazard on the roads but they also throw to waste good usable water. Two laws are therefore being broken simultaneously, the first of which prohibits rainwater connections to the public sewer and the second which requires that all buildings should have a rainwater cistern to collect water from the rooftops. We reap what we sow.

The Knights were more considerate than we are. When Valletta was being built one of the conditions imposed on the ‘developers’ was the excavation of a rainwater cistern below each building. This law is applicable to this day to the whole island but sadly is not enforced.

In the recent past, when people could afford to build houses for themselves, the majority did provide cisterns. Now that practically all that is being built consists of apartments in various shapes and sizes, developers find it more convenient to dig a large hole in the ground, below the basement garages, call it a cistern and use it as a sump, i.e. an easy way to get rid of the water and the problem of apportioning rainwater between the various flat owners, by letting the rainwater flow freely through the open rock fissures in the hole in the ground.

Most of them do not even connect the roofs to the sump but direct it to the road, the sump’s use being reduced to taking the dirty water from washing cars in the basement garage.

Were the rainwater pipes from the roofs to be connected to the sumps, some good would come out of it as the relatively clean rainwater would find its way through the limestone (which acts as a filter) and replenish the underground lens-shaped natural water aquifer. This aquifer is what constitutes the ever diminishing source feeding the proliferating bore holes dotting the island.

Reverse osmosis plants are costly to build and to run, using up electricity and seizing up when there is none available.

We owe Chadwick Lakes to Mr Chadwick and the dam builders. There were other areas earmarked for similar water catchment areas, but none of them saw the light of day.

We have a propensity to solve a problem by throwing money at it and trying to get rid of it in the shortest time possible. This is a negative way of thinking, a simplified version of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In this case it might make more sense to keep both the baby and the bathwater, but in different receptacles.

Anthony Stivala is an architect in private practice