Thousands still without water in Kent due to water supply issues

South East Water apologised for the outage, which left 8,000 people in the Kent town without supply on Thursday due to "extremely high demand."

"Currently there are 8,000 customers without supply in the Whitstable area because the storage reservoirs which serve the area have reached a critical level," South East Water incident manager Steve Benton said.

"We expect customers will start to see tap water supplies return later today, but this may be intermittent over the weekend."

Currently 7,000 customers are experiencing low pressure or intermittent supply in Tankerton, Ashford and surrounding areas, Ulcombe, Cranbrook, Coxheath and Headcorn.

A further 7,000 customers are at risk of experiencing some supply loss today.

Read more: South East Water boss to step down after damning report by MPs

Read more: South East Water warns some Kent customers will lose supply as heat pushes demand to record levels

It comes as the firm urged customers to use water for essential purposes only – for drinking, washing and cooking, as supply issues continued from over the hot bank holiday weekend.

Meanwhile, Kent County Council announced it will step up public scrutiny of water supply, quality and infrastructure in the county following a series of water outages in recent days, leaving residents “fed up”.

Mr Benton said: “Customers across Kent are still experiencing water supply issues due to extremely high demand during the very hot weather.

“We are doing everything we can to get treated water into our storage reservoirs, but some customers will continue to have intermittent water supply until these levels have been restored.”

According to the water company it pumped 628 million litres of water to customers on Wednesday, and over the weekend it treated and pumped more than 100 million litres more than the daily average for May.

It comes after hundreds of homes in Kent and Sussex were left without water earlier this week.

South East water has faced criticism and was accused by MPs of "incompetence" earlier this month over outages affecting tens and thousands of people.

Its Chairman Chris Train, was forced to resign earlier this month after MPs on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee published a scathing report saying they have “no confidence” in South East Water’s chief executive and board.

The company also faces a £22m fine by Ofwat, the water regulator, applying to issues during 2020 and 2023 in Kent and Sussex which affected more than 286,000 people.

Last December up to 16,000 homes went without water for almost a week, while in January about 30,000 properties faced issues.