Thames Water kills water supply in SW London
It seems that the modern world is no less susceptible to water outages, as the rest of the world. Having experienced firsthand, water being cut in India, Pakistan, and hearing stories of it running out in Saudi Arabia, I thought at least here in the UK, we don’t have to worry about the water being cut. I guess not.. Admittedly this was the first time that the water just stopped.. I think I remember a time maybe 10 or 20 years ago, when it happened once before, but nonetheless it happened. We fortunately woke up early enough to be able to use the water before it had completely run out.. And at the first hint of there not being enough water, we started running up and down the stairs, with buckets, filling them up with water from downstairs, pouring water into our water tank, in the loft. Unlike most modern or new houses, whilst our cold water supply comes direct from the Thames Water pipes, our hot water comes through a big tank we have in our loft…
Filling that tank, up in the loft, required many bucket loads of water and many trips up and down.. Eventually we were even using ropes to pull the buckets of water up to the loft.. But alas, the water from our cold taps finally stopped. Round about 12pm.. The guess everyone made was that “everyone else” had woken up, turned on their taps, and gotten what little water was left in the pipes..
Fortunately, we managed to get enough water into our main tank, that we could at least continue to flush our toilet, and wash our hands.. But then we just had to wait patiently, until about 4pm or was it 6pm, when the water finally started to flow again..
Throughout the crisis, the Thames Water website crashed a few times, and if it weren’t for the public tweets on twitter, I don’t know that I would have been informed, or been able to figure out what was happening.. The phone lines all were giving automated messages, with no idea of updates or what was the cause of the problem. Turns out, a couple of entire postcode areas were hit, with a burst waters main in South Wimbledon being the culprit. Thankfully that got fixed in time. Now I just hope we don’t have to experience any more water outages. It did make me think though, how luck we are, and how much we take for granted the ability to be able to turn on the taps, and get water out of them.. I wonder what life would be like, if you didn’t always get water?? When I was travelling around Peru, in Cusco, the entire city would have it’s water supply shut down during the day, and some places I stayed, we would only get ice cold freezing water out of the taps, when we did have water.
I wonder just how lucky we really are?? At least now we can get all those dirty dishes washed, without having to take them down to a river!
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