South East Water customers in Tunbridge Wells are experiencing their third day of disruption

KentOnline / KMTV

The number of people affected now rising to a reported 24,000  It comes after issues at Pembury Treatment Works, resulting in a bad batch of drinking water.   The local MP has called the situation "utterly disgraceful."  Chloe Brewster reports.

Transcript

00:00Running water is something many of us take for granted.

00:03That's until you suddenly have none.

00:05Tens of thousands of people in Tunbridge Wells have been without water since Saturday

00:09after a bad batch of chemicals caused Penbury Treatment Works to be shut down.

00:14On the first day of Christmas, South East Water said to the people of Tunbridge Wells,

00:17there still is no water. It's day three of the water outage here and people here are

00:22coming to collect these bottled water from behind me there.

00:25My problem now is how we can have our breakfast

00:29because we don't have water to boil, you know, for drinking hot drinks.

00:33You can't wash, you can't do your teeth and it's degraded.

00:38With the two kids, they frequently go for a loo and we have to clean the

00:42hygienic way in the toilets and everything, which is tedious now.

00:46It's like a total nightmare because you can't flush the toilets, you can't do anything.

00:51Theresa Barrett from the Black Horse Pub says the lack of water has forced her

00:54to cancel her first Christmas event of the season.

00:57We did lose a full day's trade yesterday. Looking at what we would have taken over the bar,

01:02we're probably looking at sort of, I don't know, £1200 over the two days. Today would have been more,

01:07probably because we had the event this evening. But for me, my rent still needs paying. That's £77 a day.

01:15My staff still need paying because it's not their fault that they can't come to work.

01:19And that money in the hospitality sector at the minute is just so hard.

01:25Residents say the issue is particularly frustrating after continuous problems with Southeast Water.

01:29So this is obviously the run up to Christmas and we, you know, Saturday, Sunday, really busy shopping

01:36weekend. We've had restaurants have had to close. I was just speaking to a hotel owner who's lost £4,000.

01:42GPs haven't opened today. Almost none of the schools are open today. The junior employees

01:47on the ground, they run the sites really efficiently. You can see behind us, you just drive in,

01:50they pick some water up, put it in your boot and you drive off. But actually at a leadership level,

01:55Southeast Water have totally failed to make sure there's an adequate supply of lorries coming

01:59to those sites. Once we've got water restored, then we're going to deal with Southeast Water.

02:04We're going to move into accountability mode. Southeast Water's incident manager, Matthew Dean said,

02:09I'm very sorry to all of our customers in Tunbridge Wells who remain without water or have low pressure

02:14today. Customers are beginning to see supplies gradually return. However, we do not expect the

02:18majority of customers to have their drinking water fully restored until tomorrow morning.

02:23Since the morning, supplies to a further 1,276 properties have been restored with another 21,000

02:29properties currently still experiencing supply issues. It's a very wet and windy day for people in

02:33Kent. But in Tunbridge Wells, they're hoping water starts coming out of the tap rather than the sky.

02:38Chloe Brewster for KMTV in Tunbridge Wells.

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