Water supplies are finally being restored to some homes in Kent and Sussex – after almost a week of chaos. Around 6,500 homes will have their taps running again after a grueling six-day outage – which has caused outrage at utility South East Water (SEW). The company blames the outage, which has affected 30,000 homes since Saturday, on Storm Goretti, which burst pipes and knocked out power.<\/p>\n
The outage led to a probe by water regulator Ofwat – Hundreds still suffer from low water pressure. The troubled water company was heavily criticized by the public as the outage was caused by a disaster similar incident last month, when 24,000 houses were affected. A serious incident was reported by SEW and Kent County Council on Monday, but not by East Sussex County Councils or West Sussex County Councils.<\/p>\n
On Friday, SEW incident manager said: \u201cWater supply to the 6,500 properties in the Tunbridge Wells area has now been restored.\u201d Some customers may be experiencing low pressure as water levels continue to rise across the region’s pipeline network this morning. Continuous supply to the city was restored after implementing a recovery plan, which included shutting down local booster pumps for 36 hours to allow drinking water storage to fill.<\/p>\n
The company is very sorry for each and every one of its affected customers. They know and understand how difficult it is to go without water for such a long period of time and how difficult it makes everyday life. Earlier this week, affected elderly residents expressed their frustration, saying they were losing their \u201ccool\u201d and that they couldn\u2019t believe they had no water.<\/p>\n
Ofwat’s investigation will examine whether the supplier breached its license terms by failing to meet commitments to customer service standards and failing to provide appropriate support to affected customers. If the regulator decides that SEW has breached the conditions, its license could be revoked. In the Kent village of Bidborough, 320 homes are still affected by low water levels. Bottled water locations will remain open today \u201cas an abundance of caution,\u201d the company said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Water Supplies Restored to 6,500 Homes in Kent and Sussex After Six-Day Outage Water supplies are finally being restored to some homes in Kent and Sussex – after almost a week of chaos. Around 6,500 homes will have their taps running again after a grueling six-day outage – which has caused outrage at utility South<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[22467,14715,22466,18099,1179,4889,22464,2637,22328,22326,1191,22465,7363,20047],"class_list":{"0":"post-29666","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-bidborough","9":"tag-bottled-water","10":"tag-county-council","11":"tag-customer-service","12":"tag-east-sussex","13":"tag-kent","14":"tag-kent-county-council","15":"tag-ofwat","16":"tag-royal-tunbridge-wells","17":"tag-south-east-water","18":"tag-sussex","19":"tag-sussex-county-delaware","20":"tag-this-morning-tv-programme","21":"tag-west-sussex"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29668,"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29666\/revisions\/29668"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nanamedia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}