Boil Water Notice extension - Open letter from Peter Perry

The purpose of this letter is to confirm that we need to extend the ‘boil water notice’ by up to one week.

The original notice started on Sunday 24th November and so we are asking customers to continue boiling their drinking water for another 7 days (until Sunday, 8th December).

Why do we need to do this?

The weather gauge at Tynywaun measured the second highest rainfall in the UK last Saturday and Sunday.

This resulted in a significant amount of flooding on site at Tynywaun Water Treatment Works and surface water running from the hill onto the drinking water storage tank and impacting the tank. This is why we immediately issued a precautionary boil water notice while we do work to protect the tank.

We are facing a number of challenges as we try to complete this despite working 24/7. First of all, some of the work to prevent damage from future flooding involves installing waterproof membranes around the storage tank.

To do this successfully, we need a period of dry weather. The intermittent rainfall this week has, as you will have experienced locally, slowed our efforts to do this and there remains a risk of intermittent rain over the next few days.

We also need to lay these membranes on the roof of the tanks, and to do this safely, we are limited in terms of the weight of machinery we can use while we work to achieve this. All this while also ensuring the safety of our team on site means that we need to take extra time to work carefully for this part of the essential works.

Compensation

To recognise this extended inconvenience, a further payment of £100 will be made to all affected households.

This is on top of the original £150 payment issued to household customers. For businesses, we will make an extra payment of £200. This is in addition the £300 payment issued to businesses together with our scheme for contributing towards certain costs/loss of gross profit.

There are three water bottle stations open for residents to collect bottled water, with over 150,000 water bottles distributed so far to vulnerable customers, households, schools and nurseries. If you know of any vulnerable customers who are not yet signed up to our Priority Services Register, please encourage them to contact us and register so that we can arrange a delivery. If you have queries or need to sign up to our Priority Services Register, call our customer service team on 0800 052 0130 – lines are open 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

I’d like to apologise again for the inconvenience and thank you for working with us while we try to ensure everything is back to normal as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely,

P. Perry
Chief Executive,
Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water