South East Water supply disruption continues

Drinking water supplies have now returned for the majority of homes in Kent after days of disruption.

South East Water said that included the 611 properties who had been without water supply in the Whitstable area of Kent on Sunday.

However, there are still 4,058 properties that "may be experiencing low pressure or an intermittent supply during the day" elsewhere in the county.

Bottle collection points opened again on Sunday after taps started running dry for thousands of customers in Kent on 23 May.

Areas affected by intermittent supplies include Coxheath, Loose, Headcorn, Ulcombe, Benenden, Kemsing, Mereworth and Cranbrook, according to the company.

Engineers are working to fix a burst main in the Pennington Place area of Tunbridge Wells, which earlier left "a small number" of households with no water.

Water has since been restored, but repairs continue.

Incident manager Mike Court said: "Although our network is continuing to recover, levels of drinking water in our storage tanks are still low and we are asking customers to use water for essential purposes only."

South East Water said overnight repairs to a burst main in Canterbury had restored supply to customers in part of the city who had no water on Saturday.

But Court said drinking water storage tanks in both Wraik Hill and Cranbrook were at "a critical level".

"We are sincerely sorry to customers for disruption to their water supply and know how frustrating it is, especially in hot weather," he said.

The water firm said it was continuing to support the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital in Herne Bay and livestock owners in the area with tankers.

Staff have distributed one million litres of bottled water and used tankers to supply more than 2.6 million litres to its network, according to the company.

An estimated 18,000 properties at the peak of the latest incidents had supply issues.

The company has also advised customers that notices had been placed on social media and posted through letterboxes "pretending to be from South East Water" with "incorrect information" that should be ignored.

South East Water has been under scrutiny since November, when 24,000 customers lost water supply or pressure in the Tunbridge Wells area.

Customers were then advised to boil their water before consumption for a nine-day period after supply returned.

Weeks later, about 30,000 households in Kent and Sussex faced days of supply issues, which bosses blamed on freezing temperatures and Storm Goretti.

The company announced its chair had departed and its chief executive would also leave following the earlier failures.

Regulator Ofwat recently proposed fining South East Water £22m over supply issues between 2020 and 2023.

On Thursday, Moody's downgraded its credit rating for South East Water, citing the "fallout" from supply failures and "continued resilience risk the company faces".

The company confirmed this affected the conditions of its licence and that it was "constructively engaging" with regulator Ofwat to "agree certain commitments that will secure a return to compliance".

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