Welsh Water CEO ‘very sorry’ as homes in west of Wales set to face fourth day without water

The CEO of Welsh Water has said that he is “very sorry” as homes in the south-west of Wales face a fourth day with no water.

The company’s CEO Pete Perry said that he hoped 4,000 homes would have water back by Tuesday evening.

Nine schools across Ceredigion have been forced to close as a result of the water being off.

“Realistically, we’re probably talking by close of business tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

“That’s Tuesday the 20th, so into the evening of the 20th of December at this rate. And once again, I apologize that it’s taking this time to get it done, but the scale of what we’re dealing with is quite huge at the moment.”

He added: “Can I just apologize to everybody was in that predicament? We’re very sorry that you’ve lost supply and we’re expending every effort to get people back in water.”

He said about 50,000 bottles of water were distributed in Llandysul and Castell Newydd Emlyn but that there had been a shortage that they hoped to replenish overnight.

They had also doubled the workforce looking for leaks.

“The reason we’re in this predicament is we saw the best part of 10-plus days of sub zero temperatures,” he said.

“We know in the west, we had three or four consecutive days at around minus-10. In some places, then we’ve had this very rapid for that set in on Saturday into Sunday.

“And what we’ve seen then is ground movement that’s caused a huge number of bursts on our network – three times more than we normally see on an average day.

“And if you add into that, the fact that we’ve had lots of bursts on privately owned customer supply pipes, particularly in rural areas where we have outside taps, and things like cattle troughs.

“So we would ask customers, if possible to do all they can to shut off any leaking outside pipes. And that would help us enormously in terms of regaining pressure in our system. At the same time, we’re looking to fix as many of those leaks as quickly as we can.

“Also, give us a call if you see a leak in the street or in a field let us know because we detected as many leaks as we possibly can. But if customers see leaks, please let us know as well by the website in west Wales with the scale of the issue that we’re dealing with at the moment.”

‘Mobilised’

The following schools were closed on Monday due to the water shortage:

• Ysgol Ciliau Parc
• Ysgol Llangwyryfon
• Ysgol Gynradd Aberteifi
• Ysgol Dihewyd
• Ysgol Talgarreg
• Ysgol Llannon
• Ysgol Gyfun Aberaeron
• Ysgol Bro Teifi
• Canolfan Aeron, Ceredigion Pupil Referral Unit (PRU)

Bottled water stations were set up at Llandysul Church Street car park and Castell Newydd Emlyn Mart car park.

Earlier Ceredigion MP Ben Lake had said that he was pressing for water deliveries to people affected by the outage.

“I am also pressing for the elderly, vulnerable and families with young children to receive bottled water straight to the door as a priority,” he said.

“A full emergency response team has been mobilised to deal with the situation, and more than 750 Welsh Water staff are out working to find and fix leaks as quickly as possible across west Wales. It also appears that the work to identify leaks was made difficult yesterday due to the heavy rain.

“Through the use of water tankers 25% more water has been added to the system in Ceredigion, and it is hoped that this will re-pressurise the network in many areas today to bring more households onto supply.”