South East Water (SEW) has told customers it cannot guarantee supply failures would not happen again during the summer months.
About 22,000 properties were impacted at the peak of the recent outage.
Areas impacted by low pressure or intermittent supplied were Coxheath, Loose, Headcorn, Ulcombe, Benenden and Kemsing, according to SEW. The company said it expected the water to be returned to nearly all the households with no supply later on Monday 1st June.
Nick Price, head of water resources at South East Water, issued the warning as customers in Kent continued to experience disruption after supply issues began on 23rd May.
Price said the supply issues were not caused by low water resources.
The disruption was a result of “high demand” after warm weather, and “our ability to take the water from our water sources and get them to customers quickly”, he said.
“It’s to do with the demand for water, rather than the water resource availability.”
The executive apologised to affected customers and said “With the weather cooling today, we are hopeful that demand will start to reduce and it will allow our storage tanks to increase.”
Price said “I absolutely can’t guarantee it will not happen again, but I can assure you that all our staff are doing their absolute best to make sure that events like this don’t occur again this summer. Fingers crossed we are better prepared next time and we don’t have any further incidents”.
It said it was delivering water to schools in areas affected by long-running problems so they could remain open.
The firm added that 2.6 million litres had been supplied to the network by tankers and that bottles had been delivered to vulnerable customers and critical care settings. Bottled water stations reopened at five locations as bosses continued to urge customers to only use water for essential purposes.
Water regulator Ofwat said it was “closely monitoring the ongoing water supply interruptions”.
A spokesperson for Ofwat said “The financial and operational turnaround of South East Water is essential, and we expect the company’s management to grip this issue quickly”.
Some 24,000 customers lost water supply or pressure in the Tunbridge Wells area.
Weeks later, about 30,000 households in Kent and Sussex faced days of supply issues, which bosses blamed on freezing temperatures and Storm Goretti.
Kent County Council leader Linden Kemkaran said on Monday that residents had “had it up to our eyeballs” with water problems.
South East Water announced in May that its chair had departed and its chief executive would leave following the failures.
Ofwat has proposed fining SEW £22m for separate incidents between 2020 and 2023.
Last month, MPs “took the unusual but necessary step” of declaring no confidence in the CEO and board of South East Water.
The Commons’ Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) found the firm’s leadership “incompetence” has accompanied “a culture of unaccountability that has perpetuated the company’s poor performance”.
