It has been raining for much of the week in the London commuter town of Tunbridge Wells, named after its mineral-rich springs.
But despite the downpour, the taps in the home of environmental lawyer Harry Wright and 24,000 other residents have been largely running dry since Saturday night.
The slightly discoloured water that is trickling through needs to be boiled and cooled before it can be used for drinking or cooking.
For Wright, what started as a mild inconvenience turned into major upheaval; his pregnant wife and three-year-old child are unwell, the nursery partially closed, shops shut and the information coming from their supplier South East Water has dented confidence.
“No shower, no toilet, no washing machine, no dishwasher — couldn’t drink or cook or work because the nursery is closed — you can’t do any of the basic stuff that I do in my day-to-day life,” he said.
On Thursday, the local health trust warned people not to use the tap water to drink, eat, cook, brush their teeth or bathe children. Even pets require boiled drinking water.
“It’s a public health issue,” said Wright, who is planning to decamp to relatives. “First there’s no water and then they say to boil the water — how do we know if it’s safe?”
South East Water initially said an issue at its Pembury treatment works had caused storage tanks to run low and that water would be restored within 24 hours and “posed no risk to health”. But by Wednesday, it warned that it was “crucial” for any water coming from the taps to be boiled first, blaming a “bad chemical batch”.
John Devall, a water expert with 45 years’ industry experience, said the company’s explanations “do not add up”.
“If there is no supply of water that’s normally due to a break in the water main or a major failure at a water treatment works,” he added. “But the fact that they are talking about a batch of chemicals, and now are asking customers to boil their water, suggests that it’s not a physical failure but a failure of water quality.”
Politicians have weighed in. Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, called the situation “shocking”, while Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, urged the government to call in the army.
The Drinking Water Inspectorate has launched an investigation. In July, the regulator’s annual report found South East Water was overdue on inspections of 30 water tanks.
Anger at water companies has been building for years, largely targeted at sewage pollution, but water outages are a growing cause for concern.
After years of lack of investment, most of England’s utilities have water and sewage treatment plants at risk of single-point failures, meaning that only one incident could disrupt supplies. At Thames Water, which serves 16mn households, 13 plants are vulnerable.
There is also mounting frustration that David Hinton, the chief executive of South East Water, has not spoken publicly to address the outage. Hinton will be paid £400,000 this year, a 30 per cent increase on last year even before any bonuses.
Last year he received a £115,231 bonus on top of his base pay despite the DWI urging the company to deliver urgent upgrades to Pembury to avoid contamination of E. coli, Enterococci and Clostridium bacteria, which could pose a “danger to human health”.
Nor is it the first time some of South East Water’s 2.3mn residents have been left without water. There was an outage in Kent in July for six days and another in January.
Two years ago, Ofwat launched an investigation into the utility’s supply failures after more than 6,000 households were left without running water for up to a week that summer. Another interruption to supplies, which included discoloured water in February 2022, culminated in a £3.2mn fine.
Despite this, South East Water was accused of being slow to set up bottled water stations and of rationing handouts to two six-bottle packs.
Liudmila Gavrilova, who runs an AI start-up, said: “The utter incompetence is worse given that the town has been through this before.
“If you know your infrastructure is in poor shape you should have some kind of contingency plan in place.”
Owned by NatWest’s pension fund, a Canadian pension fund and an Australian infrastructure investor and with a convoluted ownership structure, South East Water is financially stressed and included a going concern notice in its recent accounts.
On neighbourhood WhatsApp groups people point out that sharp bill increases this year are not delivering the service they paid for. “They had one job,” said a resident.
Customers are already facing a 38 per cent rise in bills to about £339 after inflation by 2030 and that is just for water; the utility is one of four water-only companies in England so sewage services are provided by Southern Water. Both companies have asked the Competition and Markets Authority to allow further increases.
“We know this week has been incredibly frustrating for residents and businesses and we are very sorry for the impact this has had,” South East Water’s incident manager Marc Sims said in a statement.
Tommaso Crackett, an investment manager who lives in Tunbridge Wells with his wife and two children, had little sympathy for the owners.
“The issues go way back — this is a systemic failure — it’s not an unfortunate accident,” he added.