Mr. Jerry Grant:

I thank the committee for the invitation to recap for the members the response of Irish Water to national emergencies. We have submitted a short statement which sets out a high level outline of the approach we take and how our systems have evolved over the past number of years through the various storm events and other incidents. I am joined by Eamon Gallen, who is general manager and was previously responsible for customer relations; Katherine Walshe, the head of asset operations; Suzanne Collins, who is responsible for stakeholder and media relations; and Michael O‘Leary, who is responsible for environmental regulation, which includes public health, an important consideration during these events.

We have developed incident management procedures that are in line with international best practice for utilities. They are based around a co-ordinated approach headed by a central crisis management team, with regional crisis incident management teams in place in all the regions. The focus is clearly on the mitigation of risk and trying to minimise the impact on customers, recognising that these types of events have adverse impacts on the services and therefore on communities and businesses. In the early days of Irish Water, we experienced Storm Darwin, which was a significant wind event in the south and south west. That tested the procedures to some degree and probably laid the foundation for the process we have today, which is based around an incident management framework which has a clear governance structure and ties together all the principal capabilities of the organisation.

Working closely with local authorities is a key item. One of the key lessons from some of the early events, particularly the event in Staleen, was the deployment of specific individual incident liaison officers with each local authority. That provides the continuity and alignment of information and activity so we work coherently together. Single points of engagement with other key stakeholders are critical. The principal ones are the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and the Health Service Executive, HSE, as well as ESB Networks in a particular way because of the degree of interdependence we have with the ESB for power supply. Effective linkage with the national emergency co-ordination committee is a powerful co-ordinating mechanism for the major national events we have had in the recent past. We have a full-time operational planning and emergency management function, which is within Katherine Walshe's remit. That has the responsibility to develop procedures, regular dry runs and all the contingency planning one would expect a utility to carry out for the type of events we will inevitably experience, particularly weather events and failures of critical assets.

At the heart of everything is effective customer and community relationships, particularly for the category of customers who are classified as vulnerable and have particular dependencies on water services. We work closely with the HSE and community groups to try to identify who those groups are and to ensure we can provide services, including alternative water supplies where that is important. We try our best to keep customers informed through the various communication channels at national, regional and local level with the best information we have to hand. During emergencies, things are often very fluid and it is not always possible to have precise, accurate and up-to-date information, but we have got better at doing that particularly through the deployment of the incident liaison managers in the individual local authorities.

A key part of the process is carrying out post-incident reviews. There has been no event to date from which we have not learned significant lessons to integrate into the procedures. One area of development in the past few months has been the development of specific supplier frameworks so we can call down tanker deployment, water services, standby generators and so forth by having suppliers who have stocks of those in particular areas of the country where we can have them deployed quickly. The issue of power supply is critical. Many of our plants are in relatively remote locations and can be difficult to access at critical times. We are examining the generator strategy we have deployed. Not all of our plants have generators, although many do, so fitting generators in all the critical plants and at critical pumping stations is a key objective.

With regard to resilience, there is a broader question, which we are addressing all the time through the asset investment process, which is to look at critical assets that lack redundancy or are in danger of failure and could have a big impact. What happened in Staleen is an example of that. Part of our ongoing work is the identification of these critical assets and carrying out models to examine single points of failure and where we need to build further redundancy into the assets. That is part of the ongoing investment process. Obviously a key part of that is, for example, the replacement of high burst frequency pipelines. We have replaced approximately 800 km across the country up to the end of last year. These pipelines typically have been the high frequency burst pipes that have been causing maximum inconvenience to customers. We are also developing our national telemetry centre. This provides us with online information on critical assets and how they are performing so we can respond both generally and particularly during emergencies and see what is happening at treatment plants, pumping stations and so forth and what levels of water we have in reservoirs. That information is not necessarily available to us at present across the asset base, but it will be over the next couple of years. We have much of it already but we are building it all the time.

Storm Darwin was a significant event in early 2014, principally in the south west and south. It was the first major event where there was close correlation between ESB Networks and ourselves. We developed very good relationships from then which have stood us in very good stead. I will speak briefly on the Staleen event because it was a significant failure of a major pipeline. We have pipe failures every day and we manage to repair the vast majority of them within the timeframes we give to the public, but the Staleen event brought home the fact that one can never be certain that one is in control of these events. In that case, the local authority had carried out a repair on the pipeline 12 months earlier. We understood the necessary specialists were on site and the crews went about their work. We were criticised later, rightly, for not mobilising the crisis management team earlier. However, on the Friday and the Saturday we had a full expectation that the repair would hold, but it did not. When it did not we knew by Sunday that we had a major crisis and mobilised the crisis management team. We learned some significant lessons from that, including that as a senior management team we have to be in touch with any significant failure that is happening around the country and we have to be sure that the repair is going to work and, if not, we must be prepared to mobilise the crisis team at very short notice so we can put all the support mechanisms in place.

The scale of that outage was very significant, affecting 70,000 people, and it went on for almost a week. It really brought home the critical importance of drinking water for the ordinary business of life, running businesses and public health. Indeed, after five or six days, it becomes apparent that one is getting close to a public health emergency. When toilets cannot be flushed and roof tanks have emptied, it is a very serious situation. At that stage, one is into crisis response in a serious way to try to avert a public health crisis. It shows the absolute criticality of water services being reliable so they can be expected to perform throughout the year and of the necessary resilience being in place so that when there is a major crisis such as we had then we can bring the service back quickly. The treatment plant in Staleen is a critical treatment plant, one of the top ten in the country. It is not in good condition. There is a €20 million upgrade of the plant in progress and we are about to start work on the pipeline replacement, which is important, and the pumping station on the River Boyne. That scheme will be robust and resilient when it is completed.

A key lesson from that was in the area of communications. We did not have enough alignment between ourselves and the local authority so different messages were going out. People had different timelines in their heads and were getting different information. We have done a great deal of work with the local authorities to ensure that area is properly aligned. We also work closely with elected representatives, both national and local. We recognise that elected representatives have close connectivity with communities and understand business sensitivities and particularly vulnerable customer sensitivities and can help us in that area.

We now have that relationship in a much better place.

Storm Ophelia was a major event and the first of the recent national emergencies co-ordinated from the centre. It was a test of the organisation, with a large number of people discommoded for a time. The vast bulk of those were back in service within three days, which was a considerable achievement. It was the first operation of Irish Water's crisis management function that ran seamlessly, notwithstanding that there was significant inconvenience for people.

Storm Emma was even more demanding on us. It had all of the characteristics of Storm Ophelia in the sense that services were knocked out, but there were also the access problems that come with heavy snowfalls. There was a prolonged crisis at the end, given that we then had a leakage problem. Demand increased across all schemes by between 10% and 20%. Any scheme that lacked resilience, such as the greater Dublin area, ran into trouble. We had a couple of weeks of crisis management, which had a considerable impact on the people sitting around me. Mr. Gallen and Ms Walshe were on duty throughout the event and must have been exhausted by the end. I certainly felt exhausted. I pay tribute to all of our staff who were mobilised during the weather events and to all of the local authority staff with whom we worked.

While we must recognise that a freeze event is something that will always put the water system under stress and that Storm Emma was serious, it would not be regarded as an extreme freeze because it happened in March and was relatively short-lived. Had it occurred for two weeks in January, we would have had a massive crisis in Dublin. There are no two ways about it. As matters stood, 500,000 people were without water for significant periods with all of the inconvenience that this entailed, for example, not just being out of water, but only having dirty water when service resumed, airlocks in systems, the call-out of plumbers, etc. It was a serious issue for us and our main concern now is to ensure that we have enough resilience in all water supplies across the country to ride out such events.

Irish Water demonstrated through these events the value of the national utility in achieving an effective co-ordinated management during major emergencies, working with stakeholders and local authority partners. It is critical that the state of the infrastructure be recognised and that, until such time as we can bring it to the right standard at a cost of €15 billion, we will have crises like these and will have to remain alert to our responsibilities in terms of putting contingency plans in place and ensuring our people are up to the challenge. We will continue to do that.