‘Fair play’ - Waterford locals to benefit from community facilities during future storms

People in Co Waterford are set to benefit from a range of new community facilities that will be put in place during severe weather events.

Director of Services Gabriel Hynes spoke on the subject during the November plenary meeting of Waterford City and County Council.

Mr Hynes said: “This hasn’t formally been announced but given the number of severe weather events we’re getting, we want to be ready as soon as possible.

“It’s our understanding that the Department of Rural and Community Affairs will launch an initiative where they will provide each local authority with a number of generators for severe weather events.

“The plan would be that those generators would be stored centrally by the local authority. We would supply them during a severe weather event to a community where there is a power outage.”

READ NEXT: Waterford Resident's Association honoured nationally at Pride of Place awards

He went on to outline what facilities would be provided by these generators in the event of a storm.

“This will allow a community centre in that area to be used as a community hub during the event where the community would manage and co-ordinate essential services.

“That means someone could go and charge their phone, they’d have lighting, heating, showers and so on and so forth.

“So what has to happen then is that that community centre will need to be wired up with the generator. So we would do that as a local authority and it would be funded by the department.”

Mr Hynes also highlighted what the council are looking for when it comes to the location of the community hub.

“So we intend to issue Expressions of Interest through the PPN. We invite community centres to come forward that are interested in acting as a community hub.

“It must be geographically well-located, capable of accommodating the community and during the weather event, we want the community to co-ordinate and manage the services.”

This initiative was welcomed by all the elected members present that spoke on the topic, with Sinn Féin councillor Jim Griffin saying there was “a real need and a necessity for hubs like this”.

Meanwhile, his party colleague, Cllr Donnacha Mulcahy said it was a “great idea” and gave credit to Mr Hynes and council management.

Independent councillor Joe Kelly also praised what he described as a “great development from the Department of Rural and Community Affairs”.

He continued: “For a long time in this country, we haven’t been very good at that - we react to disasters rather than get ready for them.

“This is some kind of planning to be ready for any disasters. With the climate changing the way it is, we are going to have more outages, more severe storms, so this is going to fit very well with that.”