Two UK seaside towns have been cut off from their water supplies for four days.
St Leonards on Sea and Hastings residents were left scrabbling for bottles of water from emergency supplies after a burst pipe in remote woodland caused the carnage.
The water company – Southern Water – insists that the two towns in East Sussex have now had their water supply restored and that they are “very sorry” for the mistake.
But locals are furious as they claim it’s the latest in a line of mistakes made by the water company – despite records showing the firm paid £587,000 in total earnings to its four executives during the financial year 2022/2023, reports the Southern Daily Echo.
Around 3,500 homes in the east of Hastings will again temporarily lose supply on Sunday to preserve water for the part of the town which includes the hospital.
Bottle stations were set up in the area with the Southern Water delivering water to 6,000 vulnerable residents – but one woman says the water had been stolen from the car park of the sheltered accommodation where she lives.
She said: “People were coming from outside and stopping their cars, running in and grabbing the water and took off,” reports Sky News.
Other vulnerable residents say the supplies have not been delivered. Southern Water updated locals on its website yesterday, Wednesday, May 8.
It said: “All our customers in St Leonards and Hastings are now back in supply.
“The reservoir levels are continuing to improve, the network has recovered well, and we are no longer using tankers to help support network supply, however we are using them to top up some of our reservoir.
“We’d like to apologise once again for the disruption this has caused and want to thank the community, our customers, our partners, and our people for all of their help over the past few days.
“As all residents now have mains supply, our bottled water stations have been closed and we will no longer be delivering bottled water to our Priority Services customers.
“Some customers may still experience fluctuations in water pressure whilst the network stabilises.”
The outage began last Thursday and forced some schools and businesses to temporarily shut their doors.
A major Hastings festival – Jack In The Green Festival – takes place this weekend sparking concern about how it will be affected.
Festival chairman Keith Leech said: “This year Southern Water has managed to completely close our beach because it was covered in sewage,” reports Sky News.
He added: “They’ve managed to flood our town centre because they couldn’t deal with the water that was coming through, and now they’ve managed to completely cut us off from water on the biggest weekend of the year.”
Express.co.uk has approached Southern Water for comment.
