Nearly 3,000 homes without water in the North

The damning effects of the big freeze are still being felt, with engineers now moving their focus to 2,600 homes in Northern Ireland that are still without water.

Louth County Council has agreed to supply water from its treatment plant in Dundalk to its neighbouring local authority across the border in Newry and Mourne.

Help has also arrived from abroad as the Scottish Executive continued to supply the North with thousands of litres of bottled water to help cope with the crisis.

Some homes in the north have been without running water for nearly a fortnight due to burst pipes caused by the freezing weather conditions and the subsequent thaw over the Christmas period.

Overnight an additional 60,000 homes were cut off temporarily to allow depleted reservoirs to refill. Some progress was made yesterday, with more than 2,500 getting their water supply back.

Northern Ireland Water (NIW), however, have extended its on/off rotation system to other homes overnight in order to replenish reservoirs, despite earlier expressing hope that the rotation would soon be discontinued.

While 500 NIW staff battled round the clock to restore supplies to the region’s crippled system, almost 5,000 gallons of water from temporary tanks in one of the badly hit areas in Coalisland, Co Tyrone, believed to be the work of vandals in the area.

The valves had been opened overnight, which provoked anger and disappointment amongst the people who had gathered at the bowsers at the Gortgonis Park centre to collect drinking water yesterday morning. The tanks were replaced by NIW later in the afternoon.

Away from Coalisland, the areas worst affected by the water failures are Cookstown, County Tyrone, Hannahstown near Belfast, and Burren and Warrenpoint in County Down.

Stormont’s Regional Development Minister Conor Murphy has set up an independent probe to examine the causes of the crisis, but insisted that restoring water supplies to homes and businesses remained the first priority.