Residents of Tunbridge Wells have been left without water again, just a month after a major outage.<\/p>\n
South East Water<\/a> said 6,500 households have no water at all, while thousands more have \u201cintermittent supplies\u201d.<\/p>\n It blamed the cold weather for the disruption, which caused a \u201cseries of burst water mains\u201d. The company had previously been found<\/a> to be spending more paying dividends and servicing its debt pile over two years than investing in infrastructure.<\/p>\n The company said it had set up water bottle stations and was delivering water to priority customers. \u201cOur water treatment works in the area are working at full capacity and tankers are pumping water directly into the storage tanks and the network to restore supplies as quickly as possible,\u201d Nick Bell, incident manager for the water company, said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe also have teams working round the clock repairing leaks and bursts,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n South East Water predicted there would be low and intermittent water supply throughout Thursday, but the local MP, the Liberal Democrat Mike Martin, said the issue could persist for days.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cThe issue is the number of leaks draining the reservoir \u2013 SEW are currently fixing a number of leaks which will allow them to stabilise the reservoir levels. I don\u2019t have confidence that this will be tomorrow \u2013 ie that water will be fully restored tomorrow. I think it will be intermittent for a few days.\u201d<\/p>\n From 30 November last year 24,000 homes in the Tunbridge Wells area were without drinking water for two weeks<\/a> due to a failure at the Pembury water treatment centre.<\/p>\n Earlier this week the chief executive of South East Water, David Hinton, came under fire at the environment, food and rural affairs parliamentary select committee after he suggested that people working from home were responsible for water shortages.<\/p>\n