Thousands more homes are without water after the supply to 7,000 households was cut off on the hottest day of the year.
Properties in Whitstable and the neighbouring village of Seasalter have now been affected following the mass outage in Herne Bay yesterday afternoon.
As thousands of homeowners in Herne Bay have had their water supplies restored today, many in Whitstable and Seasalter are now experiencing a ‘trickle’ of supply.
Naomi Smith, Seasalter ward councillor for Canterbury City Council, told KentOnline: “It’s creaking infrastructure – in fact not creaking just broken.
“Some people are down to a slow trickle, others are without.
“It’s just more of the same. They (the water companies responsible) need to hang their heads in shame.”
South East Water said around 3,000 customers were currently affected by today’s issue.
Cllr Smith believes the worst affected areas include Church Lane, Seasalter, static homes in Applegarth Park, Wraik Hill, the area around Lucerne Drive and Mariner’s View estate in Whitstable.
They all lost their supply around mid-morning on Wednesday.
The ‘Whitstable Labour Councillors’ Facebook group has shared a map, taken from South East Water’s website, of the areas it suspects are impacted by the issue.
Cllr Smith said her and her colleagues will continue to use the site to update residents with information about pick-up locations for bottled water as they get them.
Yesterday’s issues in Herne Bay were said to have been caused by high demand in the prolonged heatwave.
South East Water’s incident manager Nick Bell said: “This outage followed particularly high demand across Kent in the hot weather, which has seen our storage levels of treated drinking water fall significantly.
“As a result, our booster pumps were not able to work and pump water uphill, with customers on higher ground experiencing water supply issues.
“Our teams have been working hard to resolve this as quickly as possible and we have seen some recovery in our network overnight, and we’re continuing to use tankers to inject water into our network to support the area.”
Cllr Smith said with housebuilding pressures in the district what they are, she has huge concerns about the network’s ability to cope in the future.
She added: “We are challenged with building so many houses but it is an issue.”
In a statement, South East Water Incident Manager Steve Andrews apologised to those now experiencing no water or low pressure.
He added: “Demand for drinking water in Kent has been consistently higher than the monthly average every day for the past 17 days and unfortunately this increased demand in the hot weather has caused our drinking water storage levels to run very low.
“As a result, around 3,000 customers are now experiencing water supply issues in and around the Whitstable area.
“We’re working hard to restore supplies as quickly as possible, using tankers to inject water directly into our network to help get drinking water back to customers’ taps.
“We’re delivering bottled water to customers in the area on our Priority Services Register.
“”This is a free service for those who need additional support, and details about what we offer and how to register can be found at southeastwater.co.uk/priority
“We’ll be opening a bottled water station in the area shortly, with details of the location to be shared on our website.
“We know water supply interruptions are disruptive and we’re sorry to all customers impacted by this. We’re working to restore their water supply as soon as possible.”
