"Help Us !" Village protest after water outages
They say it's to prove a point about how much people are dependant on bottled water
Around 60 to 70 residents in Benenden staged a protest with plastic bottles of water spelled out on the green on Monday evening reading: “Help us”.
Pub owner Lucy Barron-Reid said the protest of around 60 to 70 people was to prove a point how much people use plastic bottled water for basic washes, going to the toilet, cooking, cleaning and looking after animals.
For her business, she said: “Apart from Covid this is the hardest thing we have had to deal with.
“Over the last few years we have had sporadic water outages and this year has become really severe, which has been extremely difficult to run a business.”
She said they made the decision to remain open since losing water last Thursday to avoid joining the statistics of pubs that close down.
The pub landlady of 22 years said the handling from South East Water is “absolutely shocking” and as a business in the outages they have to buy their own water from a different company.
“But our community has stepped in,” the 56-year-old said, adding it is getting to the point they have not got water either.
“Everyone’s a bit stuffed. It’s just really exhausting mentally and physically,” she said.
“It really is very scary, a couple of times on Saturday I got very upset and very tearful, I don’t want to do this anymore.”
South East Water’s incident manager, Mike Court, said on Tuesday that drinking water supplies have been restores to 7,400 properties in the Herne Bay, Rough Common and Blean areas of Kent, which were experiencing “no water or intermittent supplies” previously.
In July, SEW was ordered to pay £30.5 million after investigations by industry watchdog Ofwat following previous supply interruptions affecting hundreds of thousands of households across Kent and Sussex.
Ofwat said the redress package concluded three investigations into the supplier and includes a previously proposed £22 million fine for water supply failures between 2020 and 2023, which impacted more than 286,000 people.
The regulator launched a second probe at the start of this year after more supply interruptions in Tunbridge Wells and across Kent and Sussex between November and January, which left up to 70,000 homes without water.
“After years of failure, we have taken swift action to hold water companies to account,” the Defra spokesperson added.
“We have banned unfair water boss bonuses and will establish a new, single regulator with greater powers to drive transparency, helping to rebuild customer trust and protect the environment.”