He's not usually one to criticise the government but now he opens the floodgates, saying Malta will run out of water in a few years' time because the powers-that-be have failed. Former Water Services Corporation chairman Tancred Tabone speaks to Caroline Muscat.

It is rare to find somebody in the country who is prepared to tell it like it is. And the last person you expect to do so is a person who was appointed by the government to act as chairman of several parastatal companies. So on the way to meet Tancred Tabone, I had no great expectations. But he had a few surprises lined up.

He gets straight to the point: "Malta will run out of water in about five years."

That got rid of the usual necessary pleasantries rather quickly. But the news is a bit too hard to digest. Five years is much sooner than any existing predictions. And this is the former chairman of the Water Services Corporation speaking.

He held the post between 1995 and 1996, after serving as a director for five years. The writing was on the wall back then but a lack of action to address the problem has resulted in a situation that is now verging on crisis.

The deputy president of the Chamber of Commerce now says: "We have been told for many years since 1996 that we have to reduce our extraction and increase our production, and obviously this has not happened... one of the problems is political will."

He is telling the government 'I told you so'. Nobody listened then and it seems nobody is listening now either.

"Nobody seems to realise that we will be rambling in the desert in not too many years' time," he adds.

Malta's fresh water reserves are drying up. At the moment, the country is already depending on reverse osmosis (RO) plants for 57 per cent of its needs. Yet 11 million cubic metres of water are still over-pumped from the aquifers annually.

"It is unbelievable. I've held a number of posts, but I think this is the saddest one, because it is the one that is going to damage Malta most."

The continued extraction from private boreholes of massive amounts of fresh water by the private sector and agriculture means the WSC is obliged to rely more on desalinated water to meet domestic requirements.

This has already driven up the price of water for public consumption. According to figures quoted in Parliament, there has been a 123 per cent rise in the average price per cubic metre of water over four years.

The Malta Resources Authority has admitted that some of the perched aquifers have been decommissioned from the public supply beacause nitrates had exceeded the EU limit by more than three times.

"If we ruin that aquifer, which is what we're doing - and we've done too much already - agriculture will collapse. You are not going to irrigate with RO water," Mr Tabone says.

Last November, Resources Minister George Pullicino said that if the public does not grasp the consequences that over-extraction can have over the years, farmers may end up watering their fields with bad quality water.

But it seems it is the authorities that are not getting the message.

"It's as if the powers-that-be don't believe that this is the situation. They don't believe because they don't understand, although they think they do. But the reality is there," he says.

Moreover, Mr Tabone says problems for farmers have already started. He explained that, back in 1996, the aquifer in Marsa was transferred to the Marsa Sports Club because the salinity content made the water unusable. And the problem just keeps getting worse:

"In Mġarr and the Ċirkewwa area, you have exactly the same situation... farmers are complaining; they want compensation because their crops are not growing. And it's going to keep happening in different pockets around the islands."

Yet the solutions are simple, he says. "You don't have to be Inspector Clouseau to find out who's doing this. I sit here and from my window I can see bowsers coming here every day and loading water from (a borehole in) the field on the opposite side of the road. Big bowsers - between five and 10 of them a day. Where's the water coming from?"

It is easy to catch the culprits, Mr Tabone says, because water bowsers are impossible to hide. In fact, they are rather difficult for the Prime Minister to ignore - a water bowser is regularly seen parked outside Castille, feeding water into a resevoir in front of the Malta Stock Exchange.

The Sunday Times has regularly published photos of water bowsers giving water to households, with their details displayed in bold lettering on their storage tanks. An investigation by the paper last year found that most water distributors advertising in the Yellow Pages were not registered and were selling uncertified water to consumers as fit to drink. No action has been taken to limit this potential health hazard.

Malta now has more than 8,000 registered boreholes and, possibly, a few thousand more that are unregistered. It does not cost much to create one in any open field, and people have freely helped themselves to the water table since the mid-1970s.

The registration of boreholes started in 1997. Thirteen years later, the government is still saying there is insufficient information to enforce regulation, and no measures have been introduced to limit extraction of water for private use from existing boreholes.

Making those who are consuming Malta's limited fresh water reserves pay the price is not the solution, according to Mr Tabone. "Paying is a short-term policy. You can pay for the water you extract from the aquifer, but at the end of the day, what's the price for the aquifer?"

Fresh water is a resource that is invaluable to the country. It has always been in limited supply, but the people who lived on these islands always took very big decisions on how to deal with it, Mr Tabone says.

"In the 1600s Grandmaster Wignacourt did so much for the transportation and harvesting of water. Then the British in the early 19th century built a man-made aquifer at Ta' Kandja, and in the 1970s the government started introducing RO plants. Since then, nothing has been done. Nothing," Mr Tabone says, shaking his head.

What about the stormwater project to collect and store rainwater, announced recently by the Resources Ministry?

He laughs. "It's an engineer's orgasm, if I may say so." Here, Mr Tabone endorses geologist Peter Gatt's view that the government embraces multi-million euro engineering projects while overlooking natural solutions that are more cost-effective.

"Engineers measure the success of their projects by their size. Finance does not come into the equation. A successful engineer is the one who's built the biggest bridge, the deepest hole and the largest ship. The stormwater project is an engineer's dream."

Even though the stormwater project has been on the drawing board for 15 years, it is very expensive to collect water off tarmac. It costs more money to purify water that has the same runway as vehicles than it is to purify saltwater, Mr Tabone says.

"Malta has the most amazing filtration system, which is our rock. Why try and reinvent the wheel all the time? It's very simple. We have lots of valleys. Lots. They just need to stop the water running when it rains, collect it and give it time to permeate.

"There are so many other solutions that can start being put into effect tomorrow. We can dam the valleys - tomorrow. We can start making a difference straight away."

He says the water table can be saved, but drastic measures are required now, pointing out that a very small percentage of the potable water that a family uses is for drinking. Most of it is used for washing and flushing - things that do not require potable water.

His solution is controversial, but it is based on an idea floated on several occasions and one that was successfully implemented in Orange County, California.

"We have sewage water, which mostly consists of potable water, which we are now treating and throwing into the sea. Remove the contaminants left after treatment and pump it back into the aquifer - bacteria cannot live in the dark. Then it can be extracted and used for irrigation," he says.

Since Orange County Water District began purchasing land for recharge in 1936, it has developed a large managed aquifer recharge system that now covers over 1,500 acres. The system has doubled the yield of the groundwater basin and provides an average of 75 per cent of the groundwater pumped from the basin every year - a critical need after three years of drought.

The water is cleaned through fine screens, microfiltration, reverse osmosis and ultra-violet light disinfection before being pumped to percolation ponds. The facility is the winner of the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize, among other honours.

Mr Tabone says it is a model for Malta to follow: "It's simple. Look at what other people a little bit more advanced than us are doing and emulate them.

"What's the worst that can happen? An aquifer that is depleted, high in salinity, or water that needs to be purified?"

But when it comes to recommending the adoption of the solution for Malta, it is necessary to point out that the two sewage treatment plants that have been built do not inspire trust because their performance has faltered.

The third and largest one, intended to treat most of Malta's sewage, is not yet up and running. The country is still pumping most of its sewage straight into the sea.

Even when the plant is completed, the chosen technology cannot treat water to a level where it is suitable for secondary use, such as irrig-ation. For over 10 years, hydrologist Marco Cremona has insisted on the use of treated sewage effluent as a cheap alternative to groundwater for agricultural use.

For as long, he has said that the authorities have ignored him and proceeded to spend millions of euros on sewage treatment plants that cannot recover water for re-use. Mr Tabone laughs at this.

Over the coming decades, scientists forecast ever-rising temperatures leading to drought and significantly reduced availability of fresh water. But Malta would have beaten climate change at its own game. If the current scenario persists, and if Mr Tabone is right in what he says, Malta would have sucked itself dry long before climate change can play a part.

The only action taken so far to address the water crisis is based on two legal notices requiring the notification of boreholes and introducing new regulations for drilling boreholes. A one-year moratorium was also established, prohibiting the drilling of new boreholes.

Last November, water bowser owners were obliged to apply for a licence to transport and sell water according to a set of regulations that also require bowsers to be equipped with a loading cell and an electronic tracking device showing how much water is being carried. The Resources Minister said that "eventually" boreholes would also be metered.

None of the measures implemented so far limits the extraction of water from the aquifer. Irrigated agriculture, the processing industry, commercial enterprise, and the high-end domestic sector, continue to make use of groundwater in an unregulated manner, according to the MRA.

Quarries, batching plants, carwashes, slaughterhouses and other manufacturing firms have also reported that they use groundwater through boreholes. There is no restriction on the quantities of freshwater they can continue to extract for commercial purposes even though they have no licence to exploit this public resource.

In spite of the writing on the wall, the authorities are still dragging their feet. The technology exists and the country has the local expertise, but effective solutions are still a distant dream.

"We have a lot of expertise in Malta that is not being used... while the authorities have surrounded themselves with people who think they know too much for their own good."

While the country waits, a deadline is looming. The EU is obliging Malta to get its act together by 2015.

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