Portugal's water is 'safe to drink' despite polluted lakes and rivers

Portugal’s water regulator says that the country's tap water is "close to perfection" but 12,000 households still have no access to a mains supply and over half of the water sources have significant levels of pollution.

Tap water quality remains high, with levels "close to perfection" in 98.4% of tests according to an official at the regulatory authority, ERSAR.

"We continue to be able to drink tap water in Portugal without worry and, despite already being close to perfection, the safe water percentage continues to rise, from 98.2% in 2013 to 98.4 % in 2014," said the director of ERSAR’s water quality department.

Luís Simas was referring to the annual "Quality Control of Water for Human Consumption", report released by ERSAR which concludes that in Portugal ‘you can drink the tap water.’

The report found that compliance with the minimum sampling frequency by water companies was close to 100% with over 500,000 tests carried out including tests on public water supply points still used by 12,000 households whose members still do not have a tap at home, a figure that gradually is declining.

The director of the Water Quality Department explained that "there is concern" related to consumers who still have no tap water at home and therefore have to resort to other sources.

Tomorrow is National Water Day and Silves council is hosting an event to discuss the theme of "ecological corridors," one of the conservation strategies to reduce the fragmentation of ecosystems and to encourage the mobility of animals and the spread of seeds.

In this event, researchers will present papers on the main challenges facing the management of river ecosystems and associated wetlands, with examples of good practice involving local populations.

So much for the regulator’s view and report but what about the EU’s report in August this year which concluded that against European standards, only 52% of Portugal’s water sources reached the quality insisted on by legislation.

This means that half of the country's rivers and reservoirs remain unacceptably polluted fifteen years after the adoption of a European directive to clean up the country’s water by 2015.

If tap water is reaching high standards then much is being spent on cleaning and treating the water that at its source is polluted. This adds to production costs so Portugal's water can not be said to be cheap.

The EU-approved Water Framework Directive 2000 was established to ensure that water across the union was of ‘good’ standard but only 52% of Portugal’s surface water resources are categorised as ‘good’ after damning chemical analysis and poor performance against ecological criteria.

In the Guadiana region of the Alentejo and Algarve the water quality situation is worse than the national average with 61% of public water supplies falling below the level required.

The government has devised a new consultation plan which aims to achieve in the next 12 years what the water industry has singularly failed to achieve in the past 15.

The Secretary of State for the Environment, Paulo Lemos said that the latest wave of European money soon arrive in Portugal is being targeted for investments to get Portugal’s water quality back on track and ‘EC legal’ in order to avoid further conflict with the European Commission.

The original EU Water Framework Directive wanted Portugal’s rivers, lakes and reservoirs to be of ‘good’ quality by the end of 2015 but Lemos has gone for an extension of the deadline to 2027.

Lemos's  new promise is by 2021 to get 73% of the nation’s water towards the EU’s quality water benchmark, and to 100% by 2027.

One of the major problems in the National Water Plan is that there are yawning gaps in the ability to monitor the water quality in rivers and estuaries where only 50% have monitoring stations operating, only one of which is in the Algarve.

Investment in, and maintenance of the water network by the Portuguese Environment Agency collapsed in 2010. The Agency’s laboratory lost its certification so could not analyse anything much, not legally anyway, and the government was handed yet another grant of €4 million to sort out water monitoring systems.

Paulo Lemos argues that although the current situation is still problematic, this does not mean that nothing has been done. "20 years ago we had just 24% of the population with access to sanitation, now we have 78%."

Progress of a sort but when overall progress is measured against the raft of EU targets, the country’s water reserves are not in as good a shape as the Secretary of State would have us believe but at least when water comes out of the tap, it seems now to be OK to drink.

As for Portugal's record on waste water treatment, this is a book in itself with pollution levels in natural park areas such as the Ria Formosa causing economic as well as environmental damage.

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