Water company bosses say they cannot tell residents when supplies will be restored as 500 customers remain in limbo going into the weekend.
Hundreds of homes and businesses across Whitstable, Seasalter and the surrounding villages saw their taps run dry on Wednesday.
It is now the third day of the outage, and South East Water can still not confirm when the supply will return.
A councillor has criticised the communication from the firm, saying the response has been “shambolic”.
The company says a burst water pipe in the Wraik Hill area has been repaired and supplies are being restored to the 160 customers impacted by it.
But South East Water incident manager Nick Bell says about 500 customers in the Whitstable and Seasalter area continue to have no water or low pressure.
“We are using four tankers to inject water directly into the network and we’re continuing to try and remove trapped air from our system of pipes, which is currently preventing water from reaching all customers,” he said.
“We recognise how frustrating it is that we’re unable to give a time as to when supplies will be restored.
“Our teams have been, and are continuing to work around the clock to carefully remove the air and get supplies back as soon as possible.”
A bottled water station is open today at Sainsbury’s in Chestfield for customers who may still need to collect bottled water due to issues with their mains supply.
“We are continuing to deliver bottled water to customers in the affected areas, including those on our Priority Services Register,” Mr Bell added.
“This is a free service for those who need additional support, and details about what we offer and how to register can be found here: southeastwater.co.uk/priority.
“For further updates on this, visit: https://www.southeastwater.co.uk/.”
It comes after thousands more homes in Herne Bay were left with dry taps on Tuesday – the hottest day of the year so far – although supplies there have been restored.
Seasalter councillor Naomi Smith (Lab) has criticised the response to the outage.
“They have put the water station four miles away from where the problem is,” she said.
“They have given water to people who don’t need it and missed people who desperately need it.
“South East Water can’t cope with the basic needs of supplying water.”
She says Yorkletts and Dargate are the worst-affected areas, where livestock is believed to be impacted by the outage.
“It is shambolic,” she added. “South East Water is not communicating well with us, and they haven’t said when it is going to be fixed.
“Everyone is dirty as they haven’t been able to have showers.”
When the issues first started, the water company said 3,000 homes were impacted.
Yesterday morning, that number rose to 4,000, but supplies have returned to all but 500 households.
