On top of people getting sick, last year's water pollution also cost Kuressaare Waterworks as well as Saaremaa Municipality hundreds of thousands of euros in financial losses.

"The goal of this contract was to draw up an expert assessment to determine the causes of the pollution of the drinking water in Kuressaare's water supply network," explained Liis Lepik, deputy municipal mayor of Saaremaa.

"We're focusing specifically here on what happened last May," Lepik continued. "But the issue actually remains topical and important, because so long as we don't have specific certainty about what exactly happened, we also don't know how we can prevent it in the future."

Efforts have been made throughout the past year as well to uncover the causes of the pollution, but no specific and definitive conclusions have yet been reached.

The study is of scientific interest to Tallinn University of Technology (Taltech) as well, where they hope to get to the root causes within nine months.

"With what we know today, we're still hopeful that it can be done," said Ivar Annus, professor of urban water systems at Taltech.

"In the first stage, we'll try to determine through interviews exactly who did what, and thus derive a possible operational-technical description of the network in terms of who, when and what turned those pumps on or what changes occurred in consumption, such as whether any industry started utilizing bore wells differently," Annus explained. "Once we have that, then we can model it in more detail using simulation software already. Currently we have no intention of going underground to check things out, so to speak."

He added that this is of course a very interesting analysis from an academic perspective as well.

According to Lepik, it's not out of the question that a damages claim may be filed if the study should lead to a specific culprit.

"What we want above all is to determine the cause precisely to avoid such a situation from ever happening again in the future," the deputy municipal mayor said. "But really, if it should turn out in the course of this expert assessment that we have a specific party responsible, so to speak, then of course it needs to be considered whether any possibilities exist to utilize opportunities for [seeking] the compensation of damages."

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