{"id":700373,"date":"2026-07-19T19:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T19:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/700373\/"},"modified":"2026-07-19T19:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T19:00:11","slug":"south-east-water-supply-disruption-hits-thousands-of-properties-in-kent-kent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/700373\/","title":{"rendered":"South East Water supply disruption hits thousands of properties in Kent | Kent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thousands of homes and businesses in Kent are facing water supply problems for a second day, including a \u201ccomplete lack of water\u201d in some cases, South East Water<\/a> said.<\/p>\n

About 7,000 properties in the Tunbridge Wells area could face low pressure, intermittent supply or no water, after an \u201cinstrument failure\u201d at a nearby water treatment works, SEW said.<\/p>\n

On Sunday morning the company said it was \u201con target\u201d for supplies to return that evening \u201cat the earliest\u201d and apologised to those affected. Bottled water stations were open in the town for a second day.<\/p>\n

Apologising to customers, the SEW incident manager, Steve Benton, said: \u201cWe are genuinely sorry to all customers currently experiencing low pressure, intermittent supply, or a complete lack of water today (Sunday 19 July).<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not the service we aim to provide, and is not the service our customers deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cThe levels in our drinking water storage tanks are improving. However, we want to ensure that once supplies return to customers, this will be a stable, continuous flow.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo do this, we need to allow our storage tanks to replenish to a higher level than they currently are, we are still on target to see water supplies return later this evening at the earliest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company said bottled water stations would be open until 8pm on Sunday at the Tesco superstore on Pembury Road in Tunbridge Wells, and at Tunbridge Wells Rugby Football Club at St Mark\u2019s recreation ground.<\/p>\n

SEW is using tankers to increase drinking water storage levels to support the affected areas and delivering bottled water to customers on its priority services register.<\/p>\n

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On Friday the company, which supplies water to about 2.3 million customers in south-east England, warned there was \u201cmaterial uncertainty\u201d over its survival,<\/a> after a disastrous year in which the loss-making company paid millions of pounds in fines and its chief executive was forced out.<\/p>\n

Its annual report said it needed to secure fresh financing to stay afloat after taking a \u00a355m hit from outages over the winter. It was in discussions with lenders to agree a new loan facility.<\/p>\n

It has enough cash to keep going until July 2027 but said that \u201cshortly after\u201d it would need to secure more financing.<\/p>\n

Earlier last week it was ordered to pay a \u00a330.5m penalty <\/a>after investigations by the industry watchdog Ofwat over previous supply interruptions that affected hundreds of thousands of households across Kent and Sussex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thousands of homes and businesses in Kent are facing water supply problems for a second day, including a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-700373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}