31,000 homes without water for third day in a row after pipe bursts in dense woodlands
TENS of thousands of homes are expected to be left without water for most of the Bank Holiday weekend after a vital pipe burst in dense woodland.
Around 31,000 properties in Hastings and St Leonards, East Sussex, have been impacted by the outages – leaving many without working toilets or showers.
Schools, leisure centres and theatres have been forced to close due to the disruption, which stretched into a third day yesterday.
Southern Water rushed to hand out bottled water yesterday as thousands of visitors are expected to arrive in the area over the weekend.
The company said the burst pipe was ‘deep’ in Keeper’s Wood, making it difficult for crews and machinery to reach it
Spokesman Tim McMahon told BBC Radio 4: ‘This [pipe] is in a very, very difficult location. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years. It is by far the most difficult location I’ve ever seen. We’ve had to fell 50 trees just to get to [it].’
Southern Water said in an update yesterday morning: ‘Our teams worked through the night to
‘Most difficult location I’ve ever seen’
remove the broken pipe and replace it with a new length of pipework. We are making good progress on the repair.
‘When the repair work is completed, we will then recharge the network and restart our water supply works. However, this will take time and we expect disruption to continue over the weekend.’
Lesley Arshad, who lives in St Leonards, told the Today programme that she is disabled and has been left off the priority list by the water company.
She said: ‘I rang the customer service representative and he said that I wasn’t on the list and I said that I had received a letter from Southern Water to say that I was.
‘He said “oh, it’s probably because you live in a flat” but he said I would get some water but wasn’t sure when I would get it.’
Peter Haldane, who works at The Highlands Inn hotel, told The Daily Telegraph he had to queue for three hours to collect 30 bottles of water. He said there was no running water at the hotel, which expects to lose thousands of pounds in revenue.
‘We had ten rooms fully booked and we’re expecting that nine will cancel,’ he said. ‘That’s £100 a night. They are well within their rights to cancel. We don’t have working toilets or showers.’
He added that this weekend was ‘one of the biggest of the year’, as Hastings hosts the annual four-day Jack In The Green Festival.
The White Rock Theatre in Hastings was among the businesses affected by the water supply issue and was forced to cancel events over the past two days. Summerfields Leisure Centre was also forced to close on Friday, posting on Facebook that it ‘cannot open until the supply resumes’.
Churchwood Primary Academy and St Paul’s Church of England Academy also shut their doors, posting that they were also affected by the issue.
Scandal-hit Southern Water is owned by Greensands Holdings, funded by the Australian investment bank Macquarie Asset Management, which made £4billion of profit last year.
Southern provides water to 2.6million customers and wastewater services to 4.6million customers across the South East.
In 2021, it was fined a record £90 million for what a judge called a ‘shocking and wholesale disregard for the environment’ when it dumped billions of litres of raw sewage in the sea.
■ THE former boss of Thames Water has admitted that the company is ‘uninvestable’.
Cathryn Ross, who stood in as chief executive for six months last year, criticised regulators’ refusal to allow the group to increase bills to fund investment.
She told MPs: ‘The fundamental problem is Thames is not investable... Why would [shareholders] put their money in?’