South East Water urges customers to help find leaks in homes and businesses as water company looks to repair network

This is due to 70 per cent of the company’s total workload being linked to customers’ leaks.

The company again saw an unprecedented demand for water on Monday (December 19), which for the second day running increased by more than 100 million litres to over 620 million litres - the equivalent of adding almost three towns the size of Maidstone or Eastbourne to its network overnight.

Staff continued to work throughout the night and will continue locating and repairing leaks with each taking four to six hours to complete. In a normal week around 200 leaks are located and repaired.

Customers in the Paddock Wood area of Kent are now receiving water again.

To help with the massive effort to get the network refilled, an appeal has gone out for people to help find leaks inside their homes and business premises, particularly if unoccupied.

The issue was caused by the extreme weather over the past week and the subsequent thaw which has put extra pressure on the complex underground system of 9,000 miles of pipe, which take drinking water from treatment works into clean water storage tanks and then onto homes and businesses.

David Hinton, South East Water chief executive officer, said: “We are working flat out to find the leaks on our pipework, but we are also asking people to look in their attics, airing cupboards, under their sinks and to check the taps out in their gardens to see if they have got any unnoticed leaks which could be a trickle at the moment, but later will cause major damage.

“If leaks are detected, they should turn off their water supply at the stop tap and call a plumber.

“Can business owners also go and check on their unoccupied premises and landlords on any unoccupied homes as if there is a leak it could cause continued damage to their property as well as wasting valuable water supplies.”

David continued: “We are very sorry to our customers who are without water but we are doing everything we can in this incredibly fast moving and challenging situation.

“Overnight we began to see a slight improvement in the levels of our drinking water storage tanks, but with records amount of water still being lost to smaller leaks, particularly on customer premises, this is going to be a slow progress until the majority of pipes are repaired.”

Updated information on areas without water and the sites of bottled water stations can be found at https://www.southeastwater.co.uk/service-updates.