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Guernsey's water quality continues to exceed benchmarks
Guernsey Water is continuing to exceed benchmarks for water quality and providing safe, high quality, fresh drinking water to Islanders along with sustainable drainage.
The latest figures have been published in the 2020 Water Quality Report show that the key performance indicators - compliance for Prescribed Concentration or Values (PCVs) at Water Treatment Works, compliance for PCVs at service reservoirs, compliance for Maximum Admissible Concentrations at customer taps - have all been successfully achieved at rate of 99% or above.
In 2020, Guernsey Water provided 3,958 mega litres of safe and high-quality drinking water to its customers, which is nearly four times the amount of water storage at St Saviour's reservoir and conducted 7,341 laboratory analyses on compliance samples taken at water treatment works over the last year.
Margaret McGuinness, Water Quality Risk Manager for Guernsey Water, said "We know that customers value both the quality of our drinking water and our commitment to return wastewater safely to the environment. We are incredibly proud of our latest results but want to assure our customers that work on improving the water quality continues.
"Our aim is always to provide Islanders with water that they can trust, and we hope that these latest figures reassure customers of the safety and quality of our water."
During 2020, the company regularly monitored stored reservoir and drinking water supplies for the presence of approximately 125 different pesticide products, to ensure compliance with drinking water regulations. Streams are regularly tested for the presence of glyphosate, one of the most used pesticides. Sampling for the herbicide glyphosate began in 2015 and to date has not breached the UK PCV for individual herbicides of 0.1μg/l in treated drinking water.
Mrs McGuinness added: "At Guernsey Water we operate using current Drinking Water Inspectorate regulations and guidance as best practice. This means we need to meet very high standards and thanks to our committed team and technical experience we have been able to excel on these targets for another year running."