Thousands of households and a primary school in Kent were plunged into chaos for almost a week after a major water supply failure, with staff forced to flush toilets using buckets.
Headteacher's Scathing Criticism
John Tutt, headteacher of St James Primary School in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, has launched a furious attack on South East Water, describing its communication as "absolutely appalling". The school, with 630 pupils and 100 staff, faced daily uncertainty over whether it could open.
"Every day parents are prepared for a message from me between 6.30am and 7am about whether or not we can open the school," Mr Tutt told the BBC. He revealed the dire situation inside the school, where dwindling supplies meant staff had to manually flush toilets. "The deputy head and I and others in the team have to go round manually flushing the toilets by pouring buckets of water down them," he explained.
The school received just 12 bottles of water for hundreds of people, a gesture Mr Tutt called wholly inadequate.
Restoration and Regulatory Reckoning
The beleaguered water company, which blamed the outage on Storm Goretti causing burst pipes and power cuts, announced that supplies were finally restored to most of the 30,000 affected customers across Kent and Sussex by Friday, 16 January 2026.
However, the crisis is far from over for South East Water. The water regulator, Ofwat, has launched a formal investigation into a series of supply issues stretching back six weeks. This probe could result in fines of up to 10% of turnover or the unprecedented step of revoking the company's licence.
Sir Jon Cunliffe, who led a government review of the water sector, stated the issues under scrutiny are "really serious", concerning the licence condition on supporting customers and avoiding harm.
Public Anger and Executive Pay Scrutiny
The outage, which began on Saturday 10 January, is the latest in a string of failures, including a two-week incident in Tunbridge Wells last month. Public trust has evaporated.
Stephen Bales, a resident of Tunbridge Wells still without water on Friday morning, said: "The tap is bone dry. All trust has gone in the water company." Another local, Pantelis Mikellides, said he had no confidence the restored supply would stay on.
The crisis has put South East Water's boss, David Hinton, under intense pressure. He faces calls to resign, yet it has emerged he could be in line for a £400,000 bonus. This comes on top of a reported £50,000 in extra perks last year for working on implementing an average 20% price hike for customers.
Matthew Dean, the company's incident manager, apologised, saying: "We are very sorry to every single one of our customers who have been affected." Bottled water stations remain open as a precaution for roughly 320 properties still experiencing issues in Bidborough.
