Thousands of people in Whitstable are without a water supply as storage reservoirs for the area ‘reach a critical level’ during the heatwave.
Queues of people lined up at a bottled water collection point at a Sainsbury’s near the Kent town today, as South East Water said 8,000 customers were without supply.
The company has urged customers to use water for essential purposes only – for drinking, washing and cooking, as supply issues continued from over the hot bank holiday weekend.
Kent County Council announced it will step up public scrutiny of water supply, quality and infrastructure in the county following a series of water outages in recent days, leaving residents ‘fed up’.
South East Water incident manager Steve Benton said for Whitstable, it is expected the tap water supply will return later on Thursday, but may be ‘intermittent over the weekend’.
Sign up for all of the latest stories
Start your day informed with Metro’s News Updates newsletter or get Breaking News alerts the moment it happens.
7,000 customers are experiencing low pressure or intermittent supply in Tankerton, Ashford and surrounding areas, Ulcombe, Cranbrook, Coxheath and Headcorn.
Another 7,000 customers are at risk of experiencing some supply loss today, he added.
Mr Benton said: ‘Customers across Kent are still experiencing water supply issues due to extremely high demand during the very hot weather.
‘We are doing everything we can to get treated water into our storage reservoirs, but some customers will continue to have intermittent water supply until these levels have been restored.’
According to the water company, it pumped 628 million litres of water to customers on Wednesday, and over the weekend, it treated and pumped more than 100 million litres more than the daily average for May.
Earlier this month, South East Water’s chief executive, David Hinton, announced his plans to step down just a week after the group’s chairman, Chris Train, quit following a scathing report by MPs, who said they had ‘no confidence’ in the company’s leadership.
The scrutiny came after thousands of customers were left unable to access tap water, shower or flush their toilets during the outages between November and January.
On Thursday, Kent County Council said it will set up a new ‘strategic partnership’ to oversee water resilience in the county following the latest outages.
The Kent Water Resilience Partnership will be chaired by council leader Linden Kemkaran and include water companies, local authorities, regulators and others to focus on planning, performance and show publicly how water issues are being addressed.
The council boss said while the authority does not have direct power over water companies, ‘we do have a responsibility to stand up for Kent’.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.