Uisce Matters
The podcast that brings you inside the world of Ireland’s water services. Hosted by Orlaith Blaney, Uisce Éireann Communications and Corporate Affair Director, each episode shares real stories from the people working to deliver safe, reliable water and wastewater services across the country.
You’ll hear honest conversations about the everyday work, the big challenges, and the moments that matter. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at a service we all depend on but rarely think about.
Whether you're curious about where your water comes from or what happens after it goes down the drain, Uisce Matters makes it easy to understand and hard to take for granted.
Uisce Matters
Ep 6 - Leakage: Invisible pipes. Visible consequences
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Ireland’s water network spans over 65,000km — enough to wrap around the globe one and a half times. Yet much of this essential infrastructure is hidden beneath our streets, and leakage remains one of the biggest challenges facing the system.
In this episode of Uisce Matters, host Orlaith Blaney is joined by Alan Milton, Head of Water Network Management at Uisce Éireann Irish Water, for a behind the scenes look at how leakage happens and how it’s managed. Alan explains the difference between a leak and a burst, why many of the most problematic leaks are hidden deep underground, and how Uisce Éireann prioritises repairs when hundreds of leaks are being fixed every week across the country.
The conversation also explores the realities of leak detection on a national network — from the traditional skill of listening for water escaping from pipes to nighttime working and the use of new and emerging technologies, from smart meters and acoustic sensors to satellite detection. At its core, this episode is about scale, expertise and persistence — and the ongoing effort required to manage leakage and protect Ireland’s water supply.
We're fixing five, six hundred leaks a day. That's just to stand still. That needs to be seven, eight, nine hundred a week to actually bring us down below 36%. The challenge is immense.
SPEAKER_00Welcome back to Ishka Matters. I'm Orla Blamey, Director of Communications and Corporate Affairs at Ishka Airman. And in this episode, I'm joined by Alan Milton, head of water network management. Alan leads the team responsible for finding and fixing leaks across the country, reducing water loss, and helping to secure Ireland's future water supply. But with 65,000 kilometers of pipe network across Ireland, that's enough pipe to circle the earth one and a half times. That is no easy task. Much of it lies hidden beneath roads, buildings, fields, and footpaths, making leaks surprisingly difficult to find and often even harder to repair. Alan and I talk about the scale of Ireland's water network, why so many leaks are so hard to find, and how new technologies, from smart meters and acoustic sensors, to satellite detection are helping Ishka Aaron to find leaks faster than ever before. We also chat about the significant progress that Ishka Aaron has been making to reduce leakage and why there is still so much more work to do. And the simple things that we can all do at home and in work to ensure a sustainable water supply for Ireland.
SPEAKER_01We need to actually find the leak before we can fix it. And for us that's a huge challenge in problem, is finding those leaks that are occurring below the ground. Sometimes below buildings, below schools, below hospitals, you know, in very rural and remote areas. Went on to the report a leak section and report the leak. You know, it's as easy as that. And we will get to it when we will fix it. We just need everybody's advice in ears to help us. We need to achieve about 6,000 leakage interventions in the Greater Dublin area every year for the next five or six years to get to the leakage targets we need to get to. Dublin, as we know, is on a knife edge when it comes to water supply, so we can't afford for any needless volumes of water to be lost. So we've got to find them and we've got to fix them.
SPEAKER_00For a small country, Ireland has an extremely large water pipe network. And I started by asking Alan just how extensive it really is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so we have about 65,000 kilometres of pipe network across the island of Ireland. That's made up of trunk mains, which is the large, the spine that carries the water. We have distribution mains and then service pipes that go off to the houses. But it's about 65,000 kilometres. That's enough to get you around the world, but one and a half times around the circumference of the world. So it's quite a sizable network for our small island. We have a very rural network in Ireland. We've got a couple of very big urban centres, but our population is largely a rural population. If we look at a county like Donegal, 8% of our pipe network sits in Donegal, only 3% of the population. So, you know, we've got to service those homes and houses. People out there are entitled to clean water. So I think it has evolved by way settlement has evolved across the island of Ireland. Um, and I think we have to continue to service that.
SPEAKER_00And when we take a look at the pipes, I guess there's the pipes on the public network, and then there's the pipes running into people's homes, which is sometimes referred to as the private side pipe network. Explain a little for people what that means, public and private side.
SPEAKER_01So Ishke Aaron are legislatively responsible for the pipeline up to the customer connection or the boundary box or the connection tap as you might see it. And then everything then from that point in across the customer's premises and into the back of their houses and that that's the the the customer uh obligation and customer responsibility.
SPEAKER_00I was struck actually by a story that I was in a hotel recently and I walked into the bathroom and the tap was leaking in the bathroom. And then I went into the the loo and the loo was also had one of those kind of leaky things of just constant stream of water. And I slightly panicked given where I work and I thought, gosh, I went to reception and I asked them, would they um look into maybe repairing the the leak in the bathroom that was coming from the tap? People probably underestimate a little bit about just a little leak on a tap, how much water's actually been used.
SPEAKER_01Well it's it's called customer supply pipe leakage. So it's one of two things it's either consumption, it's water that's actually you know inside the premises, it's continuously flowing, like you say, in a tap, or it's dripping, or it's a cistern and a toilet that's that's broken, uh, or it's actually a leak in the supply pipe between the building and the the boundary box or a connection inside. They're two very different things. One of them, the the one in the building itself, is so eminently fixable. And you know, 50% of the calls we make when our meters show a continuous flow in arm, that's when there's a constant flow through the meter. So that means there's either a leak or there's something running inside in the premises. So we will contact customers through our first fix scheme and we say, hey, look, it looks like you have a leak. Would you like us to come out and fix it? But the first thing we'll say is, would you mind having a look around your building to see if anything crops up, like you just said there or in that premises or that? But it's those uh leaky loos, as they're called. And leaky loos are responsible for about 75% of the customer remedied private side leaks. And you know, if you think about your own home at home and you think about your cistern, how many times have you gone to your toilet and looked and seen a continuous flow? Where maybe the the handle hasn't knocked off properly and take off the lid and you'll see the ball cock is stuck, just lift it up and tighten the screws, and that'll stop the water flowing. The volume of water that'll save is phenomenal. Um, and then there's the other category of private side leak I talked about, which is you know the actual leak in the ground in the supply pipe between the boundary box and the customer's um premises. And significant volumes of water can can be lost there, and not only is it losing water, but it can be quite damaging to the to the either the premises or the foundations or the ground. We recently completed the installation of four and a half thousand smart meters in Mullungar. Now, smart meters are the evolution for what's on the desk there. They are what's called a drive-by or an AMR meter, uh, automatic meter read, whereby a van will drive past. Once a quarter, we'll deploy a van to a town or a village to read meters, and the van will harvest all that data and bring it back. Smart meters give us a read every hour where they constantly pulse out a read. And for us, we deploy those four and a half thousand metres in Mulangar. And what jumped out straight away was a premises that was using about 45 cubic meters of water uh a day. That's you know, for somebody asked me before, what does that mean? What's what's 45 cubes? What does that say? What does it look like? I remember saying to a farmer one day, well, 45 cubes is 45 round bales of silage. That's that's the volume of water leaking under your house every day. That's enough water to serve 100 premises, 100 homes that can can be that can be fed by that volume of water. So I mean that goes back to the importance of metering data. But I suppose the ask is if Ishke Aaron, if we contact you and say, it looks like you've been leaking your premises, you know, please engage with us because you know a very simple act on your part, by by checking your loo, by checking your toilet, by checking your taps, we'll save a volume of water. And if you're a non-domestic customer like that hotel you talked about, it's costing them money. That's actually going to cost them money because we charge for non-domestic revenue uh usage.
SPEAKER_00And when you take a look at the pipe network itself, you'll find, I guess, that it's not all made of the same type of pipe. So I remember being out in the NACE Operations Centre, um, chatting to the lads who were actually fixing and repairing leaks and being amazed at all the different types of pipes that would have to basically fix a problem if it occurred. So talk to me a little bit about the different types of pipes and what challenges that creates in fixing leaks.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, you'd have you'd have several different materials in the first instance, and then for each of those one material, you'll have different sizes appropriate to the flows and pressures required to meet the service connection. But predominantly our pipes that we'll install right now, we're installing ductile iron pipes and HDPE, which is high density polyethylene, so essentially a plastic pipe. Now, if you look back historically, back you know decades ago, we were installing uh asbestos cement line pipes, uh PVC pipe, and prior to that, you know, the the country, the industry was using cast iron pipes. So there's been an evolution of pipe materials over the years. But for us, Nishgarin, we have to be prepared to respond and fix a leak on any of those materials. So you'll have seen in the stores in ACE, you'll have seen materials on hand ready to have if any of those materials or or pipes are to fail. We have to have all the fittings available to us to help us.
SPEAKER_00So it does give you a bit of a sense of you've got 65,000 kilometres of pipe, you have probably eight, ten different types of materials of different sizes, different depths, um, different different types of material. So it does create a big challenge in terms of having all the resources available to go out and fix those pipes at short notice when you have a burst and a leak on the network. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And that's assuming then that the pipes have retained their original shape. We had a very large outage a couple of years ago in Mead, where the pipe had actually it had become oval-shaped through years of downward pressure of the earth sitting on top of it. So we assumed we had a spare. We assumed we had the parts, but through years of downwards pressure from the earth on top of it, the pipe had become kind of egg-shaped or oval. So we had to go and get bespoke parts made. So even when you think you have all the spares, sometimes you have to actually look at all the conditions that have arisen on the ground and find pipe fittings to actually fix the problem at hand.
SPEAKER_00And Alan, knowing where all the pipes are is another big challenge if you think about just the network and the scale and size of it and being able to understand where are all those pipes. And we often chat about the fact that they're under buildings, under, you know, dual carriageways, roads, under hospitals, under schools. Again, really challenging in terms of just knowing where the pipes actually are.
SPEAKER_01Well, if you think that the average age of our pipelines, our water pipelines in Ireland is between 60 and 80 years. So numerous generations of water services staff have have kind of passed through employment over the years, and not always records were always either kept up to date or transferred across to us as long as established in Michigan. I know of a pipeline in the West that goes from the treatment plant up to the reservoir and onwards up to a large town. And we don't really know the line of that pipe. We know it goes from point A to point B, but we're not entirely sure what fields it goes through. We're not entirely sure within five or ten metres where to find it. So if a leak was to occur or a burst was to occur on that, we would have some difficulty finding the pipe in the first place before we can even fix the leak. So that's a that's a factor of all of the historical issues that we inherited, you know, 10 or 12 years.
SPEAKER_00It brings us um very nicely on to the reality of finding the leak. And people probably don't have a real understanding of when there is a burst or a leak on the network. There's the visible one that you can see out in your road or around the corner from your where you work and you're thinking, gosh, there's there's a leak. But there's also leaks that are under the ground that we can't even see. So again, talk to me a little bit about that in terms of the visibility of leakage.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it's probably the distinction, first of all, between a leak and a burst. So a leak tends to be a gradual onset. Uh it occurs slowly due to degradation of pipe materials or a failure of fitting or failure of something under the ground you can't see. And it tends not to manifest itself violently, it tends to happen below the ground and we can't see it. So you don't see it. You mightn't know it's there for a long, long time. Then you have a burst, which, you know, even as the word itself suggests, it's a more violent occurrence. It happens through a sudden failure or sudden um breakdown in some pipe materials. And they're the ones people can see in the streets, they're the ones people can see, and they're the easier ones to find in a way. It's those leaks that happen below the ground that can cause us the most problems. There are a couple of stages to fixing a leak, but the first one is to actually find it. You need to actually find the leak before you can fix it. And for us, that's a hugely challenging problem is finding those leaks that are occurring below the ground. As you said, sometimes below buildings, below schools, below hospitals, you know, in in very rural and remote areas, a lot of our trunk mains tend to be in very hard-to-reach areas. So you won't see that leak if it's occurred. Even if it does manifest itself in the ground, you won't see it because people don't tend to go to those places.
SPEAKER_00I remember the story of a really big leak somewhere in Dublin where a new building had been developed and the there was a leak on the premises, and it couldn't be found by whoever was looking for the leak at the time. And when they eventually located the leak, it had been behind something that had been cemented up with no indication of actually that the pipe was there in terms of the, I suppose, helping leakage experts to try and find these. So there are genuinely a lot of real challenges with actually finding them in the first place.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And even, you know, there's multiple stories and examples like that. You know, we had one recently there where there was an abandoned property and abandoned house, and the outside tap of the house had just been left on. That would show up as a leak and the network, but it's actually it's actually consumption that's in an abandoned property to tap left on and flowing away. So there's loads of different things, and and that's the challenge sometimes for us as well, is distinguishing between a leak and consumption. Uh what's consumption that we don't know about versus what's a leak into the ground? And they'll manifest themselves in the same way in our water balance calculation and our formulas, but there is a distinction between consumption and leakage.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I guess, you know, when we're talking to members of the public, I mean, we get a lot of, I would say, uh, grief on social media about find them, fix the leaks, and if you just fix the leaks, and I think some of the things that you've explained, you know, show the complexity and the reality. How important is it for the public to contact us about a leak they see on the road or outside their business?
SPEAKER_01Oh man, it's it's so important for us. The more we can find, the more we can fix. You know, we have a limited number of employees and staff. We can't see everything. We need people to, if people see a leak, tell us about it and we'll get to it as quickly as possible. I was on holidays in Cork during the summer and I was walking along with my family and a leak, I could see a leak inside the road. I popped up my phone, went on to water.ie, went on to report a leak section and reported the leak. You know, it's as easy as that. You take out your phone, report a leak, and we will get to it, and we will fix it. We just need everybody's eyes and ears to help us.
SPEAKER_00Some people get frustrated when they report a leak and maybe a couple of days later it hasn't been fixed. Tell me how people prioritize fixing those leaks.
SPEAKER_01So that can be a very uh understandable frustration for someone. They've done their civic duty, they've reported to Ishke Aaron, and three days later the leak is still going. Uh, unfortunately, we have limited resources. You know, we are fixing between five and six hundred leaks every week across the country. We need to do more, but we can only do what we can with what we have. And the the men and women we have on the ground fixing leaks for us, we don't have enough people doing it for us yet. Uh, and we would love to offer careers out to people in in find and fix. But we've got to prioritize the largest leaks first. We've got to prioritize those that are serving perhaps uh hospitals, schools, commercial users. We will get to it eventually, but a prioritization uh process does happen in the operations offices before they send out staff to fix them.
SPEAKER_00And in Ishka Aaron, I guess we have you know the fortune of having a lot of the equipment you need, and we see some of it here with you today. Um talk to me first about meters. We have two meters here: a domestic meter and one that manages business consumption for water. What's the role of meters in finding leaks?
SPEAKER_01So meters are absolutely they're the cornerstone of leak detection. Um you cannot fix a leak or until you know where the water is going in a DMA, what we call a district metering area, which are the small areas that we divide our water network up into. So we send a quantity of water into a DMA. We know how much we send in through our through our larger meters on the network, and then a volume of that will be consumed through consumption, through um business premises and um residential premises, and then the balance tends to be either uh illegal or unotherised consumption and leakage, and that's the that's the calculation. If we don't know what water is being used validly via consumption, well then we can't actually calculate leakage in that area. And secondly, we could be wasting resources because there are people walking around DMAs looking for leakage that is actually consumption. So metering is the cornerstone of all leakage management. You have to know where your water is being validly used first before you can calculate your leakage quantities and before you can send resource into an area to actually fix those leaks. So for us, um you know, widespread metering is the cornerstone of leak detection in the first instance. So those meters on your desk there, we have over a million of those meters deployed across the country in residential and and um commercial premises across the country. And for me, one of my prime um focuses is making sure those meters stay working, stay active, because if they go down and we stop reading consumption, we stop seeing the the actual consumption that's happening at home to businesses.
SPEAKER_00So there's a million meters out there in the country right now in the ground.
SPEAKER_01Over over a million, there's probably a million million and a half if you include network meters and trunk meters, but meters to premises, we have just under a million domestic meters and about 200,000 non-domestic meters. So there's about 1.2 million of those type of size meters.
SPEAKER_00So there's also kind of, I suppose, technology that it's been around since forever. And one of those things is called a listening stick. And for listening for leaks, and it sounds a little bit basic, but it's still a very well-used piece of technology in relation to how basic a listening stick is to find a leak. Tell me a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_01So the cornerstone of all leak detection, the finding leaks, is actually listening for it. It's actually putting an ear to a fitting or putting an ear to the ground and seeing can you detect the noise that's associated with water escaping from a pipeline.
SPEAKER_00And you give me a few of the noises, Alan.
SPEAKER_01I'm not going to sit here and hiss and sis and make different noises. Whoosh. But the point is, water escaping from a network will make a noise. So a listening stick, as you call them, is the cornerstone of leak detection. Listening for that with trained experts who've been doing this for their whole careers. I mean, I could walk outside with some of these equipment now and I wouldn't find the leak because it's it's not, I haven't been trained to do it. We have men and women out there, uh, and thankfully we have, who will go out oftentimes at nighttime. And nighttime is the best time to go finding leaks because at nighttime, when everyone's in bed, everyone's asleep, and businesses aren't working, that's your true level of leakage. It's called your minimum night flow. And that's real level of leakage. So the men and women who work in leak detection are probably most effective at nighttime working for us. So they will head out across the network at nighttime with their listening sticks, uh, and they will, you know, they'll pick up the stick and they will find it to a or they'll sound it to an area and they'll put their ear to it, and they can tell through their their own intuitive listening um what noise that's making, where the leak is, and they'll use the pinpoint leak. Now, luckily, technology has evolved, but the premise remains the same. So to my right hand there on the ground, we've got a ground mic. That's that's the new version of the listening stick, but it does the same thing, and the premise remains the same. With finding a leak, somebody, one of my colleagues recently uh likened it to playing a game of golf. You know, you've different equipment in your golf bag, you're different clubs for different purposes. So your driver will be your first swing to get you off the T. And then as you get closer to the to the to the green, you'll use different clubs to get you closer. And leak protection is no different. You will use different types of equipment to narrow down the area. We'll start off with our DMA monitors, DMA meters. They'll identify a leak has occurred somewhere in a network, and then we'll use different pieces of equipment to get us closer to the leak. Ultimately, we pinpoint the leak then with a with a with a with a putter at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_00So Ishka Aaron obviously have a big challenge to make sure that we stop as much leakage as possible on the network. And I guess one of the things that we need to look at internally is how we measure leakage. And it's a complex subject in terms of people don't probably have a good understanding of what's involved and actually measurement, and we would have targets set by the organization to reach certain leakage levels. So talk to me a little bit about measurement. What are we actually measuring when we measure leakage and how do we go about that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I'll try not to bore your listeners, but um, you know, talking about numbers and percentages and cubic meters and the like. But essentially, we know how much water is produced. So we know how much water we produce. We produce 1.8 billion litres of water and we send it into our networks, and then we monitor how much of that is lost and consumed. So we can use our meters there to tell us how much is consumed. We then make allowances for uh use by ourselves, use by like said fire services, um, use for other other valid reasons, and then the balance will be leakage. Now, leakage is often expressed as a percentage of distribution input. That's the amount of water that you produce, it's called DI. The most common expression of leakage is as a percentage. So right now we're sitting currently at about 36% of the water that is produced is unaccounted for or lost. That goes back to what I said earlier on. It's either being used and we don't know about it, or it's genuinely leaking into the ground. But a percentage is probably the most common one that's used. Now, percentage measurement has its own flaws, it's not perfect, but sometimes when it's being used to set maybe um countries against each other or utilities against each other, we might use percentages as it's the it's the most readily available, it's the most it's the simplest to understand, but there are imperfections to it as well. But the targets we've been set recently are percentage targets. Now we can also set it in terms of the volume of water that has been lost and the volume of water that you've stopped losing. So you can't put in megalitres per day. But the simplest one for people to understand is a percentage target.
SPEAKER_00So we're currently at 36% uh that's nationally in the whole country, 36% leakage. And that came down from what number, Alan?
SPEAKER_01So we were 49% in 2014 when Ishgarin was incorporated. Look, it's a it's a phenomenally high figure, um, 49%. We've been working steadfastly over the last number of years to to reduce that. We're at 36%. Talk percentages, most developed countries hover between 10 and 30 percent, depending on a number of historic factors. It's as low as five and six and seven percent in some countries, and they have the reasons for getting there. We're at 36%. We have plans to go lower. We're working towards what's called the sustainable and economic level of leakage. It's the point at which, ironically or hard to believe, it's the point at which it actually costs more to fix a leak than it costs to produce it. So we're aiming for that point first as our starting point, and then we'll go further again after that.
SPEAKER_00Um it's interesting too. We're reading a lot about what's happening in the EU and obviously meeting with the the teams in the EU who'll be actually setting European targets for leakage. First of all, how will we stack up versus Europe when that comes to that EU measurement? We'll be probably in the bottom tier, will we, Alan?
SPEAKER_01Probably not great. The Drinking Water Directive that has recently been transposed into Irish law requires us to make a submission to the European Commission by the end of 2025, which we did, and where we set out the current levels of leakage in our largest water resource zones, and then we set out where we can get to, what we think we can get to in a 10 year plan. Uh, as I said, that figure we're currently at is 36%. That won't compare. Great when stacked against other European countries, ourselves and maybe Italy and Romania and maybe Bulgaria and a few others might be towards the bottom of that table. But that's the problem with leakage. You can't just put things down on a table and compare two countries side by side. So if you look at the Netherlands, the Netherlands are often held up as being the um the people think the country people should should try to try to be, to aspire to be. There's six to seven percent leakage in the Netherlands at the moment. But you're not comparing like with like the Netherlands have gone on 30 to 40 years of sustained watermen replacement. The Netherlands is a very flat country, so they don't have to operate at the operating pressures that we do, so they're not they're not pushing their water through the network as as with as much pressure that we are to get across the uh the hills and the lands. They're very benign soils. So our soils here in Ireland tend to be rocky and and whereas in the Netherlands it's very benign and doesn't cause leaks and bursts. So there's another you can't just compare two countries side by side and say you should get to there. There's a whole load of historical factors.
SPEAKER_00And I did hear a little story recently as well about the impact of things like storms and heavy rainfall and the climate impact. So when the rain falls on the ground and it seeps down into the network, the pipes move in the soil, which obviously can create more leaks as well. So climate's having an impact too.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. So heavy rain, heavy frost. So frost will cause a freeze thaw action, which will cause pipes to fracture and burst. And like you said there as well, if you've got a uh a very fixed material, like a pipe, and it's fragile and the ground around it shifts, well then you will get a minor shift. And even the smallest little shift will cause uh what looks like a benign fracture in a pipe, but a large volume of water will escape through that.
SPEAKER_00It there's uh us ourselves and Ishka Air in measuring leaks and providing reports, but we are regulated on this. So the CRU, the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities, basically work with us on what we invest in leakage and the amount and set targets for us, and also our environmental regulator, the EPA. You know, how important is it that we're, I guess, monitored externally in relation to this?
SPEAKER_01Well, absolutely. So the CRU monitor us as part of our price control um periods, and they make sure that we're getting value for money for the money that we're investing on behalf of the taxpayer. Up until last year, it was just the CRU monitoring us as part of the price control. But with the advent of the Drinking Water Directive, the EPA have been appointed as the regulator for leakage. So the EPA will now be holding us to account uh on our leakage figures over the next few years ahead. So the EPA have been appointed the technical regulator for leakage.
SPEAKER_00We did um a recent podcast with Stephen Burke at Ishgeair and we chatted a little bit about the reality of when you open up the ground and uh he shared a story that underneath when you open up the ground to find and fix a leak to fix a leak, that all of the services like water was the first thing to go in the ground, and overlaying that you have gas pipes and broadband pipes and electricity cables. So the challenge actually of actually fixing a leak is not as simple as maybe people might think in terms of the actual reality of going out to find it. And maybe when you open up the ground, the maps that you had from 15 or 20 years ago that were done, things have changed. It's really challenging, isn't it, just to actually go and fix it then?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And even that factor also causes an issue with finding the leaks. Well, if you think about what I said a few minutes ago, but listening, all these other noises that are happening in other things under the ground can all impact the noise that the leakage detector operative is hearing. So it impacts the finding and it also heavily impacts the fixing. You're trying to maybe do some sort of surgery on the ground by moving other utilities to left and right to get down at your own pipe, and that's just in the in the urban areas. The rural areas then present their own challenges, whereby it's harder to find a leak in in a rural network because it's of such a vast distance. And you know, pipe noises, sorry, pipe material impacts pipe, what the leak detection operator will hear. So if we've got a plastic pipe in a rural area, the noise won't travel as well as it would as a metallic pipe in an urban area. So it's harder for the leakage operators to hear that leak in that.
SPEAKER_00I also remember a story about a big leak that was found on Dawson Street outside government buildings. And the big challenge then was not only finding it and fixing it, but all the things that have to happen around that, which is shutting down the water in the business around, rerouting buses to go to on different routes. So the logistics of just opening the ground is just one part of it. So when you're fixing the leak, you've got all these other factors to make sure, and then the public disruption. And we're going to be fixing more leaks, and there will be more disruption out there for customers. So I was guess we're asking people to bear with us, are we?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and unfortunately, that disruption is only going to be to get worse because if we're to achieve our leakage targets, we need to achieve about 6,000 leakage interventions in the Greater Dublin area every year for the next five or six years to get to the leakage targets we need to get to. So it is very disruptive, and we're hugely aware of that, but we've got to do it. We've got to actually make these interventions to save water. Dublin, as we know and has been said on the previous podcasts, is on a knife edge when it comes to water supply. So we can't afford for any needless volumes of water to be lost when we can get out. So we've got to find them and we've got to fix them.
SPEAKER_00I wanted to chat to you a little bit about the Ballymore Eustace to Sagart Mains repair. So maybe when people think about leaks in their head, they think about a pipe. And I always used to think of it as like a kind of a fairly small pipe. Um, but what people don't see as much is the size of a pipe that you could walk through, like literally walk through the pipe, which is the Ballymore Eustace to Sagart Mains connection. So tell us a little bit about the story around what happened with that pipe during the summer. It was the August Bank holiday that we decided we needed to repair that. Talk to me, talk me through that story of what happened with that repair.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and as I said at the start of the of the of the podcast, there we've our network is is is huge. We talk about different sizes of pipe, different materials of pipe, all serving different purposes. So I talked about our trunk mains, and they tend to be the arteries that carry water around the country from our production plants to our reservoir. So they tend to be your largest pipes, your trunk mains. And the Ballimore Eustace pipe is one of those trunk mains that carries water from the Balymore Eustace plant to the Sagart reservoir. Now, it's one of the most important pipelines in the country. It's 1600 millimetres in diameter, as you said. Some people could walk up the middle of it. And you know, given that it's such a strategic importance to us, we we did a survey of that pipe about two years ago using some very advanced technology which carries out a scan of the inside of the pipe and it you know it goes down through the pipe and detects structural failures or potential structural failures in that pipe. That pipe is a pre-stressed concrete pipeline, which is essentially a cage of reinforced metal with concrete poured around it. And what the pipe diver does is it detects weaknesses in that reinforced metal and then detects if the pipe is potentially vulnerable to a catastrophic failure. So the pipe diver went through the survey and identified a number of locations along the line where the pipe was vulnerable. In addition to that, we deployed what's called a smartball, and we're using more and more of these smartballs lately because they're actually quite an impressive piece of equipment. And the smartball is a buoyant device that you drop into the line and it goes with the flow of the pipe. And it's it's a listening device, again, like all leak detection comes down to listening, it's a listening device that detects any escape of water in the pipeline. And the smartball detected a number of escapes of water along the pipeline. So we put the two surveys together and they identified a section of pipe that was at risk of imminent failure, and they also identified a number of uh escapes of water close by. So what we were able to do was use the technology and the advancements in technology, pinpoint an area that was potentially going to have a catastrophic failure, and pinpoint five close-by leaks where a volume of water, a large volume of water, was escaping. So by shutting the pipeline down, it's a huge piece of work. We shut the pipeline down, we got in and replaced that 30-meter section of pipe and did five internal replacements. Now that involved sending five individual crews of people up along the pipe to walk for 30 or 40 or 50 metres in some instances and seal the pipe internally and then come back out again, and then we backfill the replaced section of pipes. It's a significant piece of work.
SPEAKER_00And Alan, that repair was planned nine months in advance and even mentioned two years ago, you know, in advance, we're looking at what to do there. How many people worked on that project?
SPEAKER_01There was between 700 to 900 people worked on that project at some point. They touched off it at some point. We did a smaller repair last year, well, I say last year, the year before last, actually, in 2024, in Banamausis, which wasn't as ambitious. And that again, you know, we would have learnt a lot from that smaller repair in terms of shutting down the pipe, the volume of water, the uh attenuation ponds and lagoons necessary to store the water from the pipeline. So if you're shutting down the pipeline, you've got to drain it down. And where does all the water go? Did you drain down? And you've got to dig a big pond somewhere, an attenuation pond to store it. And even that is a huge piece of civil engineering. To do that alone was a phenomenal piece of work. I've worked on motorway projects, and at one point I I came to the site and you know, the civil engineering is going on was similar to what we would have done on motorway jobs before, to see that level of excavation and earth moving just to create a lagoon to drain down the pipe. So it's a phenomenal piece of engineering.
SPEAKER_00I'm curious too. Um, you're talking about future technology like the smartball. I imagine it is a tennis ball size going the bigger. It should be a little bigger. A little bigger. It's a bit bigger than a tennis ball. Um what about satellite technology, which sounds like so obvious in many ways that satellite could look down at our ground. And satellite technology, is that the way of the future now?
SPEAKER_01It's something I was very sceptical of, and and I've I've gone full 360 on it. I I think I I'm really an advocate of it now. Um somebody came to our door about two years ago and said, Hey, we've got some technology here. It's satellite technology, it can detect groundwater saturation of treated chlorinated water, and we'll give you a point of interest, and your leak detection operatives then just have to walk 50 metres to the left or right at that point, and hey presto, you'll find a leak. And I was like, Really? You know, satellite's going to find a leak for me. So I asked this company, you know, you know, give us a give us give us 10 free spots there and let's see what we can do. So they gave us 10 locations in Clonus, and one of our leak detection operatives headed out on St. Patrick's weekend two years ago with his listening stick or grown mic uh to these points of interest. And we got an 80% success rate back from this. So then that kind of made me sit up and listen. Well, okay, this this could be could be worth investigating further. So right now we've deployed two trials, we've gone widespread on this. We've purchased two trials, one in the Greater Dublin area and one in the northwest of Ireland. So we wanted to trial the rural area against the urban area, but the the responses we're getting back are are really impressive. We've seen in the northwest our leak detection uh find and fix crews have doubled their productivity. Because what this is doing is it's giving our leak detection operatives a healthy hand, it's giving them a boost instead of walking into a district metering area and you're wondering where in 15 kilometres of network is this leak and using the correlators and the and the groundwest to get closer. The satellite gives them a point of interest to start. You start there and then see what you can find. And it's been very successful for us. I would think it's been one of the greatest advancements in leak detection technology, um, helping you find uh a leak. I talked earlier on about the the golf club analogy. It's probably your driver, it probably gets you very close to the leak, it gets you very close to the to the green. Uh after that, then you'd have to rely on these pieces of equipment and the expertise of our of our operatives who's who's finely tuned to ears can pick up those leaks and pinpoint them. But for me, it's been hugely revolutionary in being saving time in finding the general proximity of a leak.
SPEAKER_00In Ishka Aaron, we're spending a lot of time looking at a new supply uh for the Greater Dublin area, but also a solution in the water supply project that will take water up from the Shannon, about 2% of the flow, and will also help approximately 50% of the country, so along the pipeline. So people sometimes say to us, if you fixed all the leaks, you wouldn't need the water supply project. Talk to me about that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so it sounds great. Unfortunately, it's not the truth. And not even talking about the resilience factor. Like you know, it's not a good idea for a city like Dublin to be reliant on one single source of water. But even separate to that, we can talk about quantities. I don't want to start talking about numbers and quantities because I'll again I'll start to bore people. But if we look at the graded urban area, the current level of leakage we think is about 29% now at the moment. I'm waiting on exact numbers this week, but we're down below 30% in the graded urban area, which is a huge achievement from where we were a number of years ago. We were about 36, 37%. But again, if we're to talk, express that percentage as a volume of water in the graded urban area. So we send about 650 megalitres of water into the graded urban area, and 30%, just some 30%, is leaking. So that's about 200 megalitres is leaking. Now in the GDA, background leakage is 12%. So even if we were to do everything that possibly physical for us to do, background leakage, which is those small little leaks that you will never find, those little ones that are so insignificant and so inconsequential we can't find them, just the volume of them is so vast, leakage in the GDA will still be 12% without a widespread replacement of every water pipe in the Greater Lubin area. So even to get down to 12% would be a phenomenal achievement. The sustainable economic level of leakage in the greater dubbing area is 24%. So we're not that far away from the sustainable economic level of leakage. And if you turn around and express that as a volume of the water that's being uh lost in Dublin, you know, if we improve, even if we improve by 5%, we're only going to improve that by 30 or 40 megalitres. And the volume of demand that's needed in Dublin, the amount of water that's lead in Dublin, could never be satiated by fixing and finding leaks. We need far more water than we could ever ever bring about through leaked leaks reduction.
SPEAKER_00And Alan, I guess um somebody asked me one day, does Alan Milton dream about leakage at night? Um, what's most on your mind um for 2026 in terms of just the reality of the work that you and the teams are doing? And I see fantastic people out there like David Kingsland in Galway, uh DJ Angland, you know, people on the ground. How are they feeling about this big challenge around really getting behind fixing leaks? And they do terrific work.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I don't sleep a huge amount, so I don't get time to dream. But the the reality is we have a huge challenge ahead of ourselves. We're very lucky to have people like the men and women you've mentioned there on the network working for us, bringing their expertise to this area. But the challenge is immense. Like as I said earlier on, we're fixing five, six hundred uh leaks a day. That's just to stand still. One of the funny things about leakage is if you do nothing, it will get away from you in a heartbeat. So we've been working so hard to get from 49% down to 36%, and we need to get down to 30 and lower. But a significant challenge is just holding what we have done already. And if we were to stop investment in the morning, the Water Research Centre in the UK have calculated that we'd be back to 49%. It would take only less than a year for us to get back to 49% leakage. So a lot of what people are doing for us is maintaining the steady state, and then we've got to do more, we've got to go harder, go further. So those 600 leaks a week I talk about, that needs to be seven, eight, nine hundred a week to try and get down, to actually bring us down below 36%. So I mean it's a huge challenge for us. So what keeps me awake? I mean, the water meters there that I pointed on your desk earlier on, they're critical for us. We've got to get as much deployment of water meters across the country as we can to know where our water is going. We've got to make sure the meters that are there are working. Then, if that's working and we know where our water is going, then we can set about efficiently asking our crews to go into areas and fix leaks after that. But look, the challenge is immense. Um, leakage is one of the things you're not going to cure it. Leakage can't be cured. You can manage it, you can minimize it, it's always going to exist. Uh in Ireland, we're never going to get down to that five, six, seven, ten percent like I talked about in the in the Netherlands. Uh in Ireland, we have 12 metres of pipe for every man, woman, and child in the country. If everything happened in the country, we have 12 metres of pipe. We're only one of five member states in Europe that have greater than 10 metres of pipe per person. So looking at where we are as a country, looking at the organization, the way we've come about, the scale of our network, the size of our network, we'll never see a point where we're down at that you know 10%. We do we go as low as we can, where we can, we'll get to the sustainable economic level leakage uh across the country, and then in those water scarce zones, people where we need the water, we'll go past the sustainable economic level leakage because it's not about money in those instances, it's about supply and volume. So look, we've uh we've we've 10 years work ahead of us at least to get to SELL across the country, and after that, then we'll go further again. So um, yeah, there's a few years' work ahead of us at least.
SPEAKER_00Well, Alan, thank you very much for sharing all of that. Certainly the size, the scale, the complexity, and the reality, it's not just a matter of just going out and fixing a little leak here and there around the country. The scale is enormous, the length of the pipeline is enormous. But it's great to hear that we've got the technology and the innovation coming in Ishka Aaron, as well as fantastic people out there doing this every day. So I suppose the ask to the public is keep reporting those leaks to us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and thanks for having me, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about this because it can be um something that people don't know a huge amount about. It is very complex, but ultimately, as well as you said, just fix the leaks. We will. We'll fix as many as we can. We need everybody's help to help us find them.
SPEAKER_00That's it for this episode of Ishka Matters. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to like, follow, and subscribe. And if you're new, there are previous episodes waiting for you. Find Ishka Matters on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.