Scotland's hot weather spikes water demand by 200 million litres a day

People watering plants and filling paddling pools pushed the demand for water by 200 million litres a day last week, Scottish Water has said.

Kes Juskowiak, operations general manager at Scottish Water, told BBC Scotland the hot weather had caused demand to soar across the country.

Increased tourist numbers this year is also contributing to the problem.

Mr Juskowiak said the company had "struggled" to meet demand in places, with tankers used to ensure the supply.

Temperatures reached 28.2C on Saturday at Threave in Dumfries and Galloway, according to BBC Scotland Weather.

The hot weather is also set to continue for the next few days, with the chance that even higher temperatures could be recorded by the end of the week.

Mr Juskowiak said: "Last week, with the great weather into Tuesday and Wednesday, we've seen demand rising across the country - probably up to an extra 100 million litres on each day on Tuesday and Wednesday. From Thursday onwards, that took a significant jump up to 200 million.

"It's not isolated to certain parts of the country, it's broadly everywhere. But in some of our more more rural hot spots, we really struggled to meet the customers' demand during that time and needed to take additional measures to ensure people have safe drinking water at all times."

Normal demand at this time of year is around 1.8 billion litres a day, Scottish Water said.

Across all of Scotland this has risen by 10% to two billion litres, but some areas of the country have seen demand spike by as much as 40%.

Mr Juskowiak told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme that there were particular supply issues in the East Neuk of Fife, Orkney, parts of Argyll and Bute and Moray.

He said demand was high in many "tourist hotspots", but added that Scottish Water had been planning for this year's "staycation challenge" for a long time.

Many people are choosing to go on holiday in the UK this summer rather than travel abroad because of the Covid pandemic.

"Scottish Water's put in a lot plans to make sure that we can support the tourism industry," Mr Juskowiak said.

"We can keep up, but what it means is there's a lot of tankers on the road. It means a lot of disruption for local communities and it means blocking up roads."

Mr Juskowiak added that while tourism was an issue, most of the demand came from garden use and pleaded with people to "use water wisely".

"If you need to water your plants, please use a watering can rather than a hose. A hose uses 1,000 litres of water an hour - that's the equivalent of five families' normal use in a day," he said.

"Paddling pools can use up to 5,000 litres of water, that's closer to 50 families' normal water use."

BBC Scotland Weather forecaster Gillian Smart said the current UK heatwave was down to a large high pressure centre - the "Azores high" - moving south of the country, leading to high temperatures.

"At this stage it looks like we've got tomorrow, Thursday and Friday as very similar days of high pressure, very high temperatures - about 25C to 27C in the hottest spots," she said.

The weather is due to turn cooler and cloudier this weekend.