‘The big failure was the utilities’ - Mayo County Council report on Storm Éowyn

A new report on the response to Storm Éowyn from Mayo County Council will find the state’s water and electricity utility providers ‘failed’ in their response to the storm because of ‘a lack of resilience’.

Mayo County Council’s Director of Services, John Condon, told a Environment and Climate Change SPC meeting that a report combining reviews of how the storm was handled on a Mayo-basis, regional-basis and nationwide-basis will be presented to the council in due course. 

READ MORE: Eir apologises to Mayo residents after taking more than 100 days to fix telephone pole

Highlighting water plants that didn't have back-up generators and various hilltop transmission sites for the various communications facilities without backup generators or batteries, the Mayo County Council official concluded that the ‘the big failure was the utilities’ in the state’s response to Storm Éowyn. 

Failure to maintain access roads through forests to sites was also a compounding factor for the utility services. 

He said it was ‘hard to believe’ that some of the landlines aren’t up and running yet in the times that we live in’.

Another observation that came up during the review was that areas with more trees saw more damage to infrastructure. He noted that there was “a logic to that, if there’s no tree to fall on your line, then the line might stay operational.”

The report will also find that Mayo County Council, the Gardaí, the HSE “did what they were supposed to do and had things under control within a relatively short period of time”, according to the Mayo County Council Director of Services. 

READ MORE: Five Mayo GAA players reported to authorities for living conditions

Mayo was one of the first to get the humanitarian response and community support provisions up and running. Condon expressed a hope that the humanitarian support structures created would become a permanent structure in the event of a future weather event.