Portugal tap water quality at international 'level of excellence'
BY TPN/ LUSA,
The quality of tap water in Portugal is excellent, according to international criteria, with 99% of good quality around the whole country, an official for the national regulatory agency for the sector, ERSAR, said on Thursday.
"We have gone from very good quality to a situation of excellence, and in 2015 we achieved for the first time 99% safe water, which is a criterion considered internationally to be a level of excellence," Luís Simas, the director of the agency's Quality Department, told Lusa. Simas, who was speaking after the release of the annual report on "Quality Control for Water for Human Consumption" for 2015, explained that where infringements are detected, 80% are pointers to a need for improvement in ways that do not directly affect health. Instead, they "function as a warning so that suitable measures are taken to avoid the situation worsening."
Most of such situations, he added, "are in the interior of the country, in smaller supply areas, and less along the coast and in densely inhabited areas."The remaining infringements are "related to compulsory parameters [and happen] occasionally, because of characteristics of the origin of the water or because the treatment did not function with the efficiency that it should have," he said. When these are detected, "the managing entity is obliged to correct them".
Last year, more than half a million analyses were carried out, with 330 left uncompleted. That, Simas said, is in line with previous years and means that controls are still being done "with great rigour and with results that make it possible to have a very precise and exact idea of the quality of tap water".
