There’s no doubting it, this has been a tough week. For many of us the extreme dip in temperatures has affected our lives greatly. Be it school closures, water shortages, or seriously dangerous driving conditions, most of us have had to come to a hault in order to deal with the big freeze.
The most debilitating side effect of all this has to be water shortages. Now I may not have had my home flooded before Christmas, but I unfortunately was without water for some of this week. There’s nothing more frustrating than being left without water, especially when there’s nothing you can do about it.
We were inundated with phone calls this week from angry residents who were getting nowhere with the council over water stoppages and dangerous road conditions.
Now I agree fully that the state of our roads over the past couple of weeks has been ridiculous, from housing estates to back roads it has been seriously disruptive for many people across the county, as have the water stoppages at night, and in some cases a complete lack of water altogether. But, to be fair, we can’t go around blaming our local authority for everything, especially the water problems. After all how many us who live in new enough estates have been left with no water. This isn’t an issue for the council, but more an issue with the building developer who laid pipes too close to the surface. As for roads, well I do think it was unfair to leave dangerous secondary roads alone when it came to gritting, but you know, us in real rural Ireland are used to this!
So now that the big thaw is on, and we wait to get our water reserves back up, perhaps let’s leave aside the anger for once.
Hey look on the bright side, at least we know what running water is! I’m so fed up with us all being fed up! Perhaps the entire country needs a sun holiday.
In the meantime maybe let’s take a time out to remember how lucky we have it. All we have to do is look west to Haiti, where a massive earthquake has left the country in ruins. Water shortages are nothing compared to a humanitarian disaster. The country is one of the poorest in the western hemisphere as it is, and infrastructure would have been fragile before the earthquake hit on Tuesday night, so you can imagine the devastation that’s there now.
Perhaps we should count our blessings, and be thankful that nature wasn’t too harsh on us.
Remember things could always be worse.
