Finally, it happened, another part of Kent without water. South East Water in trouble again.
However, it was only when our poor residents tried turning on taps sometime during the early evening of Sunday 11th January, that anyone knew there was a problem. The first South East Water alert we saw was at 21.12 on Sunday – no information at all. It was only at 09.32 Monday 12th that a message talked about ‘We are sorry to customers experiencing low water pressure or no water….’ blaming Storm Goretti for the conditions – now a burst water main.
Despite HPC making many phone calls to SEW, no-one could really tell us what was going on or the likelihood of water restoration. Dreadful service in all. So our HPC Resilience Team leapt into action and with considerable help from Peter and Sue Smisson from the TH Memorial Hall Committee and other volunteers, we managed to secure a large quantity of water bottles from Tesco and Bookers.
Facebook alerts went out and so did a HPC communication, plus word of mouth, of course.
Fortunately, we were able to get water to the most in need parts of our community fairly quickly. Again, SEW were supposed to have a ‘priority’ list of residents – but not a bottle in sight from them!
On Monday, out of the front of the Tyler Hill Memorial Hall, from around 9am to 4pm we handed out, or took to residents, well over 50 x 2ltr water bottles, some young families received 5lt bottles. More bottles were delivered to families later that evening too. We had tried to prioritise those without cars, the elderly, residents with mobility issues, as well as families with very young children.
We had residents from Blean arrive as well, thinking that we were a SEW bottle station and we apologise to anyone we had to turn away without water. Our supplies were limited and if the water outage had gone on for more than another day, we would have been struggling to supply Tyler Hill’s vulnerable residents.
The Conclusion: Thanks to everyone who pitched up and pitched in to help – proof that with a ‘Resilience Plan’ a community can pull together and make a difference. HPC have learnt lessons from this too and we will be honing our ‘plan’ to ensure we can meet the needs of all our residents in the future.
South East Water? Well apart from having ‘no plan’ they couldn’t even ascertain how many residents were affected, swinging between 1500 and 9000.
We have been told that they will pay for the water we purchased – but nothing in writing yet. Frankly, their whole response to this incident is completely unacceptable and we will be taking the matter further.