Estate residents forced to store water as taps run dry from daily water outages

By Robert Firth, Local Democracy Reporter

Residents of a South London estate have to store water in saucepans because their taps keep running dry.

People living on the Friern Road estate in Southwark say they have been suffering daily water outages for the past few weeks.

Families have been forced to fill up bottles in advance for cooking and drinking because they don’t know when their taps will stop running.

They say Thames Water initially blamed Southwark council – the owner of the blocks – for the problem.

But when they rang up the council, they claim staff told them the problem lay with Thames Water.

The water company admitted responsibility for the water outage in a statement.

Gregory Kat, 64, said he’d never known anything like it in the 30 years he had been living on the estate. He said: “It has never been as bad as it has been this year. The water has been going out almost twice a day for the past three weeks.

“You will get up first thing in the morning and go into the kitchen and there’s no water. I have to have a saucepan out with water in it all the time, just in case I go to turn on the taps and nothing comes out.

“Big businesses like Thames Water are really letting us down. You call Thames Water about the problem and it’s like they’re automatons. They say they don’t know about it and then they say they do know about it and pass the book to the council.”

A couple of floors above, Jo Wade, 29, said the water had been cutting out in her flat for the past month. Last Saturday she was without running water for the entire day, while the week before she said it had cut out for at least two hours each day.

She said: “There hasn’t been any help when the taps have stopped running.

“I have kind of given up. I just make sure that the kettle is full and bottles are full so I can have a drink and cook.

“We lost water the first time on that 40C day in July but I think that was a one-off. The last few weeks it has been on and off. It’s frustrating.”

Thames Water blamed the water outage in Friern Road on a burst water mains pipe. It said the problem was fixed by September 14 in a statement to the Local Democracy Reporting Service. It didn’t comment on reports of the water cutting off again on Saturday.

A Thames Water spokesman said: “We first received customer reports of no water and low water pressure on Sunday, September 4 in the East Dulwich area.

“Our engineers attended the scene on Monday, September 5 and located a burst water mains pipe, which had led to the outage.

“Between Monday, September 12 and Thursday, September 14 our repairs team successfully replaced the burst water pipe. We’d like to offer our sincere apologies to residents who were affected during this time.”

Pictured top: Friern Road estate in East Dulwich (Picture: Robert Firth)