People whose water supply has been cut off say they are furious at water companies, desperate for updates and worried about businesses collapsing.
Thousands of households in Kent have suffered water outages, leaving them unable to flush toilets, wash their hands, take showers or wash up during the record-breaking heatwave.
Over the bank holiday weekend, about 800 homes in the villages of Charing, Challock and Molash had supplies cut off.
By Thursday, the water outages had worsened, and about 8,000 homes in the seaside town of Whitstable, north Kent, had been cut off from water supplies for 24 hours.
Cafes, pubs and restaurants have been forced to close at the start of the tourist season, raising fears for the future of the businesses.
Queues have built up at bottled-water collection points in Whitstable and nearby Herne Bay, costing people time off work and causing long traffic tailbacks.
In Herne Bay, where thousands of homes have been hit, a doctor’s surgery was forced to close and move appointments to another site. A leisure centre also had to shut.
South East Water warned around 6,500 customers in the town would experience an intermittent supply again on Thursday.
Richard Torble, from Whitstable, said he had to spend an hour queueing for bottled water when he should have been at work, and his 10-year-old son was desperate for a shower after a football camp in high temperatures.
He said: “There were hundreds of cars queuing, and I saw an old gentleman walking across the dual carriageway carrying six bottles of three-litre water on his own, so it’s having a huge impact.
“But it’s not so much the inconvenience, which is obviously terrible – it’s the appalling lack of communication from the water company.
“You’ll get a text alert that says visit the website, but the website says, ‘You don’t have any water’. I know I don’t.
“Everybody asks, ‘When is it going to be back on?’ and their response is, ‘We don’t know’. People are desperate for information.”
He said communication was also poor the last time the water was cut off. “You would have thought that they would have learned, but clearly not,” he added.
“Whitstable town is full of cafes, bars, restaurants, and they’re all closed – the entire high street’s closed, so they’re losing money hand over fist when they should be doing good business this time of year.”
Mr Torble, a software developer, slated the “apparent lack of urgency” to fix the problem and said repeated water outages were one of several issues in the UK that might one day drive him to move abroad.
Another Whitstable resident, Julie Friel, said: “We can’t wash, we can’t drink. It’s just wholly unacceptable on the first week of hot weather for this to be happening.”
The Old Neptune pub on Whitstable seafront was forced to turn customers away as it had no water or flushable toilets.
Landlord Darren Wilton told KentOnline: “It’s just unacceptable. We’ve had a wet winter. I can remember February – it rained every day. Where’s all the water gone? I’ll tell you where it’s gone – it’s all the leaks in the road that they’re not fixing.”
Labour councillors on Canterbury City Council have called on the government to step in, writing a letter which reads: “This situation is unacceptable in modern Britain and is causing significant distress to families, elderly residents, vulnerable people and local businesses.
“The lack of water provision also has huge negative impacts on our farming and rural communities, both in terms of livestock welfare and agricultural productivity.”
They said South East Water needed to provide a “firm and robust infrastructure delivery plan outlining how they are going to fix these problems in the short and long term”.
“The urgency of this cannot be overstated,” they added.
South East Water says the exceptionally high temperatures have created very high demand.
It is calling on residents to use water for “essential purposes only” such as drinking, washing and cooking, because demand is outstripping the speed at which it can treat it and pump it to homes. It is also asking householders to curb their use of children’s paddling pools.
Incident manager Steve Benton apologised and said he expected water in Whitstable would return later on Thursday, but may be “intermittent over the weekend”.
South East Water’s customer services director Tanya Sephton said they were truly sorry for the impact the situation had had on residents and businesses and that the company would compensate customers and businesses fairly.
“In the shorter term, our priority continues to be to reduce leakage. We spend over £63m a year on finding and fixing leaks and assets across our network,” she said.
Nick Price, head of water resources, said raw supplies were “in a healthy position”, but added: “When a whole neighbourhood uses water all at the same time, it pulls water out of the local pipes so fast that the pressure drops. The result is the families at the far end of the network or on higher ground can see their taps run completely dry.”
