Village spells out ‘help us’ using bottles after enduring a week with no water

Villagers have spelled out the words ‘help us’ with thousands of plastic bottles after suffering a week with no water.

Some 1,800 properties across Tunbridge Wells, Kent have had no or low water pressure since last Thursday – one week on, there are still approximately 400 affected households.

Frustrated by the recurring shortages, landlady Lucy Barron-Reid, who runs The Bull in the village of Benenden, rallied villagers to gather with all their empty two-liter plastic bottles to show the environmental impact.

At 5pm on Monday, 70 to 80 people spelled out the word ‘help us’ with the mound of plastic on the cricket square.

The 56-year-old said: ‘We wanted to show the environmental impact of not having mains water, the amount of plastic that was collected in less than one week, and add some community spirit.

‘Everyone is exhausted; let’s not forget, we’ve just had three or four heatwaves in a row, and two of those heatwaves we’ve not had any water.

‘The whole thing was to say come on South East Water, this has got to stop but you’ve also got to start listening to us. You can’t just keep sending different reasons daily as to why the water is off.

‘They’ve got to come up with an answer; they can’t keep sticking plasters on it.’

The pub landlady believes some ‘crucial questions’ need answering, where the plastic is coming from, who is profiting from it, and whether South East Water discusses recycling with Tunbridge Wells council.

She says each person – representing about 70 to 80 households – brought around three bin liners full of plastic, with roughly 25 bottles in each, which amounted to something in the region of 6,000 bottles.

‘The waste is incredible,’ she added.

Lucy, who has run the pub for 22 years, says the water supply was consistent up until four years ago, and ‘what you would expect in the 21st century’, but since then there have been ‘sporadic outages’. ‘This year, it’s been really bad,’ she said.

The latest outage is now in its eighth day, and is now as long as the longest outage residents have previously experienced, which lasted more than a week. They also went without water for five days over Christmas.

The publican has decided to remain open for now, because a closure could have a financial impact on the business. But she says it is  ‘incredibly difficult’ to run without running water.

She added: ‘As an individual it’s difficult, like it is for any other resident. Just having to think, right, we need to flush the loos, we need to shower, put the washing machine on, drink water, to just live normally.

‘As a business owner, it’s all of those things tenfold because we’ve got to still cater for customers.’

Iden Green resident Peter Massey had no water for three days last week and says the normalisation of outages has become a ‘big issue’.

He said: ‘The thing that upsets me is the drip feed from the government and the water companies is all about normalising this.

‘They’re talking about, should we do surge charging when there’s a lack of water? This is just about normalising the idea that there will be a lack of water.’

He added: ‘We shouldn’t be expecting to have less than 100% of taps with running water in this country in this day and age.

‘We’re not going to accept that we don’t get water out of our taps.’

South East Water said up to 1,800 properties in the Benenden and Rolvenden areas of Kent may have been experiencing low pressure or no water as of Wednesday morning – as of Thursday this number has decreased to about 400.

South East Water’s Incident Manager Jenny Rhodes said today: ‘Overnight, water has been returning to customers in the Benenden area.

‘We have been using tankers to support the network and storage levels at our tanks have improved significantly as a result but we will continue to monitor the situation very closely.

‘We know how difficult it has been for our customers to be without water for so long.

‘This is not the standard of service we want to provide and we apologize sincerely for the frustration and inconvenience it has caused.

‘We are already looking at the actions we need to take to prevent this happening again.’