Queues for bottled water as thousands lose supply

Thousands of people have had their water supply cut off due to technical issues at a treatment works.

Thames Water apologised to those around Godalming, Surrey, who were affected and said Shalford treatment works had been affected following issues “caused by Storm Ciarán”.

Long queues built up for a bottled water station, set up in Godalming Crown Court car park, after people lost supply on Saturday afternoon.

Chancellor and MP Jeremy Hunt posted on X, formerly Twitter, that a major incident had been declared.

He said he had spoken to Thames Water CEO Alastair Cochran.

“The site controls at Shalford Water Treatment Works have been reset and they’re testing turbidity at low water production volumes,” he said.

“If this is successful, they can increase production to a level that will restore supply.”

Waverley Borough Council leader Paul Follows said he believed between 5,000 and 10,000 homes were affected, while Mr Hunt said 13,500 homes were off supply with a further 6,500 expected to be cut off shortly.

Thames Water has not confirmed either of these numbers.

Mr Hunt said the next question was the potential impact on schools on Monday, if the incident was not resolved.

“Also getting messages from pubs that have lost trade from closing on a busy day – big, big impact on many people,” Mr Hunt added.

As well as Godalming, residents in the nearby villages of Milford, Witley and Bramley reported outages.

A second bottled water station has also been set up at Artington Park and Ride in Old Portsmouth Road, Guildford.

Both water stations will be open until 21:00 GMT on Sunday.

Supermarkets said people were panic buying bottled water and Waitrose in Godalming said it was sold out.

As traffic in the town built up, Mr Follows urged people who did not need to go out and get bottled water to avoid doing so.

“Try and carpool so there is not excessive traffic,” he said.

Thames Water said it was doing everything possible to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.

It said it was “continuing to work hard to restore supplies as soon as possible”.

“In the meantime, we have a fleet of tankers pumping water into the local pipe system,” the supplier said in a statement.

BBC reporter Julia Abbott said her husband queued for water for about an hour and was only given enough for one household, despite requesting water for elderly neighbours.

Ian Boardman, who was queuing for water, said he had not been given any information about when his supply would be back and would rather not be “saddled” with plastic bottles if it was going to return shortly.

He said: “I don’t really want a load of plastic going into my recycling bin.”

Susan Carlin, also in the queue, said she noticed her water stopped about 16:45 on Saturday evening.

“I noticed I couldn’t flush the loo then my daughter said there wasn’t anything coming out of the kitchen taps,” she said.