Severn Trent Water has bottled water available for customers in the Ladywood, Harborne, Longbridge and Walker’s Heath areas of Birmingham who may be experiencing supply issues today.
The water company has released the following statement:
“Customers who have no water can collect bottled water at Sainsbury’s in Frankley Beeches Road B31 5AA, our teams will be there until 10pm and are on site now and have thousands of litres of water available for anyone who might need it.
The rapid thaw has seen our teams called out to an unprecedented number of burst pipes. To put that into perspective, we had an increase in burst pipe alarms of nearly 4,000% on Sunday.
This is because, when water freezes within a pipe it expands, putting more pressure on it and causing it to split, or the joints to pull apart. When the temperature starts to increase again, the water then starts to leak out. This has put pressure on our network and has seen pockets of customers experiencing low pressure or periodic interruptions to supply during Sunday evening.
Our teams worked tirelessly throughout the night to fix many of the bursts, and as a result we have managed to restore supplies to nearly everyone who was impacted.
We’ve got our treatment works working at full pelt which means we’ve got plenty of water and we’re pushing it out into the network, but we have to juggle supply and demand as some of it is leaking out of these new bursts before it gets to customers.
We can reassure everyone that we’ve brought in extra teams and that everyone’s working hard to get supplies back to normal as quickly as possible. We’d just like to say sorry again to all of the people who have experienced issues with their water supply since the sudden thaw yesterday. We know just how hard it is to be without water and we really appreciate everyone’s patience as our teams work round the clock to mend the bursts and so reduce any customer impact.
As a precaution, we’re also getting bottled water to our vulnerable customers in the areas that were affected last night but who we now believe are back on, and we’re making sure that particularly sensitive customers, like care homes or people on dialysis, are prioritised.
We’re also working with hospitals, again as a precaution, such as The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham Children’s Hospital.
We’d like to reassure our customers that we’re doing everything we can to get the water supplies back on as soon as we can.”
