Town's on-off water supply frustrates residents

Frustrated residents say the water supply to parts of their town has been cutting in and out for several weeks.

Geoffrey Taylor, one of the people hit by the ongoing problem in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, said he "begrudges paying the bills".

He said he and his wife, Janet, had experienced intermittent water outages since Christmas and it "drove you nuts".

Anglian Water (AW) said repairing a water main that supplied Chatteris, damaged by a third-party contractor on 29 January, had proven "complicated", but it was "hoping to have everything back to normal" by 17:30 GMT on 13 February.

"We keep paying more and more money and we get less and less service and I was supposed to be a priority because of health problems," Taylor said.

Janet Taylor said it seemed "to be a daily occurrence now" and that her son, who also lived in Chatteris, "couldn't even wash his hair".

"I think we're just being fobbed off all the time by Anglian Water," she said.

Sue Unwin, a town councillor, said: "It's been off and on for the last few weeks.

"It comes out sometimes as a dribble and sometimes not at all."

She and her husband, Kelvin, had been taking showers at the Empress Swimming Pool in Chatteris.

She said Chatteris residents must have been wondering "what's going to happen when the reservoir comes" if "we can't cope with this".

The Fens Reservoir is planned between Chatteris and Doddington and will supply water to 250,000 homes.

AW has said it will "secure a reliable water supply for generations to come".

In a statement about the town's supply, AW said: "We're sorry if you're still experiencing very low water pressure in Chatteris and surrounding areas."

It said smaller pipes taking water from surrounding areas into Chatteris had "struggled to cope" and had tripped their pumps "on a couple of occasions".

"[To] reduce the chances of it happening again, we've made some adjustments and popped additional monitors around our network so we can keep a close eye on what's happening," the spokesperson said.

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