Pipe trouble bubbles over
SEVERN Trent Water has shed more light on how its engineers went about battling a leak in Cheltenham which left thousands with dry taps over Sunday and Monday.
Not one but two burst pipes contributed to the A40 outside GCHQ being flooded and bottled water being shipped in for families across the GL52 postcode to access.
The first problems surfaced on Sunday morning and prompted a warning to motorists to try and avoid one of the main routes into the town, such was the scale of the flooding on the dualcarriageway between the Arle Court and Benhall roundabouts.
It later emerged a second pipe had burst, making repair work doubly difficult.
The first burst pipe was beneath the road outside GCHQ, the second on Badgeworth Road, further down the A40.
A Severn Trent spokeswoman said the second burst also made redirecting water supplies down undamaged pipes to people’s homes tricky and that took longer than they wanted.
She said: “Although the two burst pipes were nothing out of the ordinary for us, as you can imagine, we fix a lot of leaks, having two in the same area at the same time meant that moving water around our network to get supplies back on was tricky and took longer than we’d hoped - there were a lot of valves to turn and it had to be done carefully, to avoid any further issues.
“Our teams worked through the night until everyone was back on.” The first customers had water restored at about 9pm on Sunday evening with others following on Monday morning.
Such was the demand from the thousands of households for water at that point that pressure dropped significantly. Repair work to the two burst pipes then took place throughout Monday and the system was restored to normal in the evening. The spokeswoman said they are still investigating what caused the bursts and said: “Unfortunately there are many reasons why pipes burst - but we will of course try to see what the cause was so that we can avoid it happening again if possible.”