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Frank Dean: Water is Alderney's top priority

States member Frank Dean has said the collection and treatment of water is Alderney's top priority.

Mr Dean outlined a water strategy during May's States meeting but warned a lack of cash may prevent the island's "totally inadequate" collection and treatment systems from being improved.

General Services Committee member Mr Dean said: "Water is now at the top of our list of financial priorities.

"We have an engineer in place to progress the work and there is total commitment within the States to finally resolve this problem.

"The first thing we need to do is look at our totally out of date and totally inadequate distribution system.

"We are faced with huge demands on our available cash resources but we have made a start and, after all the years of inactivity, that is a very good place to be."

Mr Dean said new automatic treatment and monitoring of the island's portable water will be fully operational within four weeks.

He said: "On-going testing of our raw water sources will ensure the water going forward to pre-treatment is of significantly improved quality. The overall benefit of this at the treatment stage cannot be emphasised too strongly."

Mr Dean said the first phase of the strategy will deal with the collection of raw water from various locations and with providing transfer facilities to the island's main storage at Battery Quarry.

Phase two will establish a new filtration and conditioning facility at Battery Quarry, with greatly increased capacity and modern treatment and quality monitoring equipment all in one location.

The final phase of the programme will be to replace the storage at Trigale with modern tankage, pre-distribution monitoring and appropriate pumping. At present there is no time schedule for this phase.

Mr Dean said: "We are faced with huge demands on our available cash resources and it would not be prudent to make time forecasts beyond phase two."

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