Days of Liffey smell numbered

Days of Liffey smell numbered

24 Dec 1981

Multi million pound cleanup

The foul state of the River Liffey has for years been the source of jokes for Dubliners. It has been said that if you fell in you would die of poisoning before drowning. But all this is soon to end as the giant Dublin sewerage scheme nears competition. It will be a much cleaner river.

The project is a joint venture by Dublin Corporation and County Council. Conceived in the mid 1960’s the scheme is intended to take the burden of the city’s domestic and industrial sewage from the old overworked system that has been used for decades.

Large areas of Dublin county will also be served and the system can be extended if need be to the rapidly emerging and expanding satellite towns around the city’s peripheries. –

The hub of the new system is the now completed Grand Canal Tunnel running from Inchicore to Maquay Bridge on Grand Canal Street. In addition there is i connecting tunnel to a pumping station and sewage treatment works in Ringsend.

After treatment the outfall will be discharged, in what, the experts describe as a highly diluted “healthy” state into Dublin Bay.

It is predicted that the condition of Dublin Bay will improve dramatically as a result of this process. Any remaining sludge left over after treatment is to be dumped far out to set by ships.

The cost of the Dublin Sewerage Scheme was estimated initially at a little over £6 million. Current estimates have raised that figure to just under £36 million. The final figure when the scheme is complete in about two years time is expected to exceed £40 million.

The scheme, officially entitled “The Greater Dublin Drainage Scheme”, centres OE the Grand Canal Tunnel Sewer This runs alongside the Canal and is the main artery into which dozens of smaller tunnels and drains will connect.

The minor tunnels will serve existing and planned townships around the city. In addition existing sewers will be connected to the new system. The Grand Canal tunnel is roughly the size of a railway tunnel.

One of Dublin’s chief sewers is in fact a river. The River Camac runs into Dublin from the west of the county. It passes through Clondalkin and on to Inchicore, much of the time underground, where it flows under the level of the canal bottom.

The various studies commissioned by Dublin Corporation including the comprehensive Crisp report, blamed the Camac for much of the pollution so evident in the Liffey. It enters the Liffey alongside Heuston Station.

For years it has borne the brunt of foul waste emanating from old industries along its course, mainly paper mills. Now all that foul waste will be diverted into the canal tunnel along with waste that has been pumped into ‘Other Dublin rivers including the Liffey itself, the Dodder, the Tolka and the tiny Poddle.

“With new system coping with foul waste Dublin’s environment and waterways in particular will receive a tremendous boost.” says a spokesman for Dublin Corporation.

“A clean Liffey is a few years away yet, probably not until the middle of this decade. But the improvement to it and other rivers will be ongoing. It will certainly be an awful lot better than it is now,” he adds.

Much of the present discharge into the Liffey. is surface and rain water from the streets which passes through the drains. This will still be discharged into the river but what it termed “foul waste” will be diverted to the new system.

The main tunnel will also swallow up a lot of surface water. Its capacity is sufficient to cope with what meteorologists call “a 200 year storm”. This is a storm of such intensity and high rainfall that it is likely only to occur once every two centuries.

About three quarters of everyday waste discharged into city sewers is surface water, the rest being foul waste. The tunnel is designed to cope with separate inflows of both. It will collect the foul waste from two smaller tunnels coming from Blanchardstown and Clondalkin (Tallaght has its own system which follows the River Dodder and is to be connected to the new Ringsend treatment plant.

The two tunnels merge at Goldenbridge in Inchicore and a little further on link with the main Grand Canal tunnel.

“The capacity of the main tunnel is vast,” says Chief Dublin City and County Engineer Kevin O’Donnell.

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