Thousands without water as main bursts twice in 24-hours
Households handed bottled supplies as engineers work to find and fix fault
A burst main which left up to 2,000 homes and businesses without water on Sunday ruptured again within 24 hours.
South East Water apologised to those in the Bearsted, Willington and Park Wood areas, who had been left without water. Bottled water was hand-delivered to those known to be affected and a station was set up at Bearsted Green where others could pick up bottles if needed. Supplies were returning to normal in the afternoon, however there was further disruption just hours later when the same 10-inch cast iron main in Ware Street, Bearsted burst again at 1.30am Monday.
Technicians worked through the early hours to fix the leak, but to add insult to injury temporary traffic lights put in place due to the damage caused by the water beneath the road surface became stuck on red Tuesday morning.
Long queues soon built up as traffic was affected by the faulty sequencing.
Speaking about the supply issues, South East Water’s distribution manager Mark Rice said: “It’s difficult to give an exact number of customers who were without tap water supplies as a result of the issues on Sunday and in the early hours of Monday morning.
“We believe it had a greater impact on Sunday and up to 2,000 homes and businesses could have been affected, however, we were able to restore supplies to many by re-routing water around the complex network.
“This means the interruption may have been shorter for some than others.
“We know being without water causes disruption and inconvenience to our customers and would like to thank the community for its patience while we worked to fix the problems.
“Bottled water was made availableto customers within the immediate area and our customer care team contacted those who are on our priority services register to see if anyone needed extra support.
Incident manager Jim MacIntyre said: “Unfortunately, bursts do happen on our 9,000 mile, underground network as it’s under high pressure, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Restoring supplies is our main priority and we work hard to make sure customers have their water back as soon as possible.”