2023-11-21 15:59:00
What is the quality of the water coming out of your tap? The question arises after the investigation of RTBF’s #Investigation program dedicated to PFAS. The answer is sometimes difficult to find. And for good reason: water distribution in Wallonia is divided into 647 zones managed by different companies.
There is the Walloon Water Company (SWDE, the largest with its around 250 distribution zones), the CILE which manages around twenty municipalities in the Liège region, the INBW which takes care of a handful of others in Walloon Brabant (a province where the SWDE is also active), in Namurois it is INASEP and the SWDE who share the territory. In other, rarer cases, it is the municipalities themselves that manage the distribution network.
In short, there is something to get lost in. However, each company responsible for water distribution in Wallonia regularly conducts water quality tests and (sometimes) publishes its results on its website. But until now there was no map bringing together all the available results. This is why the Décrypte team has compiled all the resources accessible online into a single interactive infographic to be found above.
This new map shows the quality of the water coming out of your tap. It therefore differs from that published last week on our site by the Décrypte and #Investigation teams and which highlighted “hotspots” where high concentrations of PFAS were identified. These hotspots were not necessarily water intended for human consumption. Even if in some cases, such as in Chièvres in particular, drinking water contains these eternal chemicals.
The aim of the map at the top of this article is therefore to:
provide a complete overview of the situation by identifying places where analyzes in the distribution network have shown higher concentrations of PFAS than elsewhere; highlight the division into water distribution zones and show which zones have been analyzed or if tests are in progress; inform about the source of water in an area.
As you can see: the land register is currently clearly incomplete. This map should be enriched in the coming weeks as new tests are carried out and made public.
The official website of the Walloon Ministry of the Environment specifies that “the analysis of the quality relating to the 20 PFAS of the 650 public distribution zones existing in Wallonia began in September 2023. The results will be communicated every 3 months to the Walloon administration via the SIQueP online platform. The first results are officially expected by the end of the year“.
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