THAMES WATER has apologised to Reading residents who are suffering from low water pressure or no supply to their taps – and says the supply will return in the coming days.
On Saturday, a problem at Pangbourne Water Treatment Works saw the taps start to run dry across the RG1, RG8, RG30 and RG31 postcode areas.
Yesterday, the firm thought the issue had been fixed, but an airlock saw the fault reoccur and residents started seeing supplies fail.
Today, the issue remains, compounded by leaks in east Reading.
It has set up a bottled water station in the car park of the Tesco Extra store in Napier Road, and says its teams will place the bottles into people’s vehicles directly. They also want people to only take what they need.
This will remain open until 9pm today, Monday, January 22.
With residents unable to have a bath or shower for three days, it appears that the Whitley whiff will return, along with the Tilehurst Stink and the noxious Newtown nightmare.
Residents have taken to social media to express their frustrations with the lack of updates from the firm, with some saying they are on the vulnerable list and should have had water delivered to them but had received nothing.
Others said they couldn’t report the issue as the mechanisms to do so were broken, or they spent hours on the phone trying to get through.
This morning, the company has issued a statement giving an update, however they are unable to give a precise time as to when supplies will return to normal.
A Thames Water spokesperson said: “We’re really sorry to customers in the Reading, Pangbourne and Tilehurst areas who are experiencing no water or low pressure, due to airlocks in our mains pipes.
“This follows technical issues at our Pangbourne Water Treatment Works, which were resolved on Saturday afternoon. As our reservoirs refill, we expect water pressures to continue to increase across our network, bringing water supplies back to normal in the coming days.
“We have opened a bottled water station at Tesco Extra on Napier Road in Reading. We will continue to deliver bottled water to customers on our Priority Service Register.
“We’d like to thank our customers for their continued patience while we fix this, they can find the latest updates by visiting our website.”
For more details, Thames Water has set up a dedicated webpage: https://www.thameswater.co.uk/network-latest/pangbourne-wtw-outage-20-jan-2024