Hampshire County Council leader Cllr Nick Adams-King meets with Southern Water to review three-day outage which hit thousands of homes and businesses

THE leader of Hampshire County Council has met with Southern Water for answers after a technical fault left thousands without water.

As reported in the A&T, the company’s chief executive Lawrence Gosden apologised last December after 58,000 customers, including many in the New Forest, were impacted by the three-day outage.

Mr Gosden promised to learn from the incident at its Testwood water works – the single biggest water supply incident in the company’s history – and set aside compensation of £9.7m.

Cllr Nick Adams-King met with company directors alongside other local representatives including New Forest District Council leader, Cllr Jill Cleary, to discuss a review into the outage, which he previously blasted as “woeful, chaotic and un-coordinated”.

The meeting included a discussion on bottled water distribution, the operation of the priority delivery scheme, and how the issues were communicated.

Mr Gosden previously admitted that opening “just one” bottled water station on the first day was “far from adequate”, and that Southern Water “failed to obtain sufficient quantities of bottled water”.

Cllr Nick Adams-King told the A&T: “Southern Water have clearly undertaken a comprehensive and honest investigation into what went wrong in December, both with their systems to cause the water outage and their subsequent communication and emergency response.

“Their feedback was very much focussed on their own systems and procedures and the attendees from NFDC, Test Valley BC, Eastleigh and Southampton, as well as the county’s emergency planning team, reflected strongly to Southern Water that working with partners, utilising the capacity and local knowledge of the local councils and identifying a more localised response would be beneficial.”

He added: “Were this ever to happen again Southern Water need to work with the local councils to provide more water distribution sites, better and more accurate communication about how to access them and much improved arrangements for those on their priority distribution list.

“They were open to those suggestions and we will be meeting with their senior leadership once again in June to review progress.”