A BOREHOLE is thought to have contaminated drinking water in the Makedonitissa area in Nicosia, resident Olga Salangos – a civil engineer at the Dhekelia desalination plant – said yesterday.
Salangos told the Cyprus Mail that the Nicosia Water Board had admitted that a borehole could have contaminated the water she and her neighbours had been receiving since November 21, through a possible leak in the area’s water pipes.
The desalination plant engineer said on Monday she had carried out 20 of her own tests on the drinking water provided to her home in Makedonitissa over the past two months, and found that it was not “suitable for consumption”.
Water analysis of her drinking water and those of five neighbours showed 347mg/l of sodium, 315mg/l of chloride and 1,200mg/l of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS). The European Union stipulates that these levels should not exceed 200mg/l, 200mg/l and 500mg/l respectively, she said.
Fed up with being ignored by the authorities, Salangos went public, prompting the Nicosia Water Board to agree to take a sample of the water, in her presence on Tuesday.
However, she claimed that, on Monday, the Water Board decided to empty out all the area’s pipelines and re-filled them with fresh water, forgetting to take a sample of the old water before the pipes were empty.
Therefore when it was time to take a sample of water from the pipes the following morning, the analysis came back clean.
“In light of this, we decided to take a common analysis of a home water tank that we believe represents the water that was being given to us in previous days. This is because the person living there lives alone and would not have been able to empty out the tank in a day, only to for it be refilled with the new fresh water,” she said.
She added that the Water Board now believes the area may be suffering from a borehole contamination, as it insisted it had not been distributing “bad water”. A full investigation was imminent, she added.
“Basically our target is to get good water. It is not there to lay blame anywhere or to point the finger. We just want good quality water and nothing else.”
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
