Letter: I Think We All Know Thames Water Won’t Really Be Held to Account

Published on: 7 Nov, 2023
Updated on: 7 Nov, 2023

From: Wayne Smith

In response to: Some Homes Still Without Water – ‘Thames Water Will Be Held to Account’ Says MP

I think we all know that Thames Water won’t actually be held to account, they’ll just trot out the line about it all being the fault of Storm Ciaran – a storm that didn’t produce the biblical rain and high winds in the Guildford area that the Met Office had forecast.

It beggars belief that an organisation such as Thames Water doesn’t have adequate emergency procedures planned and ready to go for such a basic thing as the logistics of distributing bottled water to residents.

Roads around Artington, on the Guildford to Godalming road, were reported as gridlocked. It took several days to open a third site at Sainsbury’s Burpham and yet another day for one at Milford.

Today when they were reporting that three out of four residents had had their water restored some roads in Merrow woke up to low pressure or even no water at all when their supply had been fine yesterday.

Will lessons be learned? I very much doubt it but one thing we did learn is that our local councils could only parrot information from Thames Water and Surrey County Council as the overseeing authority were woefully inadequate in their leadership of the crisis.