Good afternoon
Following the latest cold spell and with temperatures set to rise rapidly this weekend, we’ve reviewed our approach to supporting our customers in the event of a ‘freeze/thaw’ style event.
We’ll be reminding our domestic and business customers to be on alert for bursts and leaks over the coming days, offering advice about how to prepare their properties and how to reach us in an emergency.
It would be appreciated if you could share this information and links where possible.
With a thaw predicted to in the next few days, the most important thing is to ensure people know where their stop cock is located, should they need to turn the water off in the event of a burst. Where is my stop tap? (southernwater.co.uk)
With businesses closing for the Christmas holidays, we’re also urging business owners to turn of the water if their premises will be unoccupied over the holidays. For more tips on how to prepare for cold weather, visit: Retailer useful information (southernwater.co.uk)
There’s supporting information available at: Prepare your home for winter (southernwater.co.uk) and How to stop your pipes freezing and bursting in cold winter weather (southernwater.co.uk). We also post regular updates on our social channels – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
In an emergency, customers can call us 24/7 on 0330 303 0368. Calls are charged at a local rate.
We have put in place a number of changes across the business aimed at mitigating risk and improving our response to any incidents:
- Early and frequent communications to customers
- New measures to assess when severe weather is likely to have significant impact on water networks
- A complete overhaul of our incident management system, from identifying the potential for an incident, through preparation stages and actual incident handling to post-event management.
- Major investment to improve the resilience of our networks. In particular, we’ve added many more remote sensing devices to the water network to better monitor flows and deliver updates in real-time.
- We’re also working more closely with Local Resilience Forums.
Thank you again in advance for sharing and sign-posting relevant information. If you have any questions, please do get in touch.