“Isaid Samantha Hargreaves as she pushed a trolley full of bottles past the queue of cars waiting for water in the Asda car park. For the second year in a row, her water supply was cut off shortly before Christmas and she was filling her car with extra bottles to give to neighbors with limited mobility.
“A lot of us are struggling,” said Hargreaves, 31, a community health assistant.
Hargreaves is one of tens of thousands of residents served by Southern Water in and around Southampton whose taps ran dry or lost pressure on Wednesday. With 58,000 homes in Hampshire suffering ongoing power outages due to supply engineering failures, industry regulator Ofwat has announced that power bills in the area will rise more than anywhere else in England.
“I’m not worried about that,” said Roger Brown, 67, pointing to bottles of water being unloaded in the parking lot as part of Southern Airlines’ efforts to contain the crisis. “I’m more angry that my water bill is going to go up.”
Water bills in England and Wales will rise by an average of 36% over the next five years, but Southern Water customers will see their bills rise by 53%. Ofwat said the funding would be invested in plans to reduce leaks during storm overflows – a major cause of raw sewage dumps polluting UK waterways – as well as to meet tougher environmental rules and build new reservoirs to cope drought. Ofwat said the proportion of customers receiving billing assistance will more than double, from 4% to 9%.
But the news sparked outrage over perceptions that private water companies failed to invest in repairing leaky pipes or provide reliable services.
“Why should I pay extra for work they should have done years ago?” Brown said. “These water companies have the audacity to ask us to pay for this. I bet once it’s paid, our bills won’t go any lower.
Disruptions to Hampshire’s water supply are expected to last into the weekend, closing schools, forcing businesses to close and causing queues and severe crowding around three bottled water distribution centres. Southern Water said it had fixed the technical glitch and would begin reconnecting customers on Thursday afternoon. “Overnight our teams resolved the issue at the Testwood water plant and reactivated the site. We are now refilling the reservoir with potable water in preparation for restoring supply. This is a gradual process that must be done carefully and safely , but customers will begin to be reconnected today. We are working to have supply restored to all customers by the weekend.
“It’s a little annoying, especially at this time of year,” said 29-year-old hairdresser Sophie Orton, who has had to cancel appointments during what should have been a busy period. “It’s frustrating.”
“It’s such a nuisance,” said Clive Brown, 72, a retired commercial diver who served in the Navy. “It makes you realize that you take it for granted. You turn on the faucet and the water comes out—and you don’t think about it until it stops.
The outage did not come as a surprise to residents in parts of Hampshire, such as the New Forest, which experienced similar problems last year.
Julian Leyland said his family went without water for two to three days in November 2023. . Now, the school his two sons attend is closed because of the recent power outage.
Leland, a water expert and director of environmental sensing at the University of Southampton, said he still had water bottles from the last crisis in his garage and buckets in his garden that could be used to flush toilets.
“A little bit of self-sufficiency goes a long way,” he said.
Some have criticized Southern Water’s handling of the situation, complaining about a lack of communication and a failure to deliver water to people on the priority delivery register. Hargreaves, who was on the list, said she only received a pack of water bottles late last night.
“I didn’t receive anything,” she said. “When they were delivering, they would leave them downstairs and people would pinch them.”
Paul Legge, who filled up bottles of water in the Asda car park, said he didn’t have a car so he had to cycle in.
“Luckily, I still ride my bike out,” said Legg, a retired woodworker. “But it annoys me that we didn’t even notice… My daughter asked me to go to the website. At the end of the day, not everyone can make a website. How do you drink water if you’re old?
Britain’s for-profit water industry is in crisis, with high water bills, leaking pipes and raw sewage leaks sparking outrage. As water bosses pocket more and more of their salaries, the situation becomes even more tense. A Lib Dem analysis in March found water companies’ profits had almost doubled since 2019.
At the same time, climate change will threaten Britain’s water supplies and force governments, businesses and households to adapt to a world where there is often too little and sometimes too much water.
“There’s a general public perception that we live in a wet and rainy country,” Leland said. “The whole concept of drought is pretty foreign to most people.”