Water began coming back to some Whitstable homes on Friday evening after a supply disruption left about 3,500 customers in the seaside town without water. South East Water said the return of taps was only partial, warning that supplies would likely stay intermittent across the weekend.
The timing matters because thousands of people in Kent were still dealing with the fallout on the same day, and Whitstable remained one of the hardest-hit places. South East Water said 17,665 customers across the county were affected by outages, low pressure or intermittent supply, while 339,972 water bottles had already been handed out at bottled water stations.
For Sarah, who owns Elise Hair in Whitstable, the disruption has already cut straight into her business. She said the last few days had been a nightmare and that she had to cancel all her clients because she could not offer colouring services without usable water. Bottled water was no help for removing colour, she said, leaving the salon unable to work normally.
That frustration was visible across the town on Friday. Whitstable residents protested against the shortages by washing themselves and cleaning their teeth in the sea, a sign of how basic the problem had become for people who could not rely on their own taps.
South East Water blamed the disruption on incredibly high demand during the hot weather, and said some customers across Kent were still seeing low pressure or an intermittent supply. The company also said about 165 customers in Cranbrook were without supply because the drinking water storage tanks serving those areas had reached a critical level, while around 10,500 customers in Benenden, Coxheath, Loose, Headcorn and Herne Bay were facing low pressure or stop-start service.
The immediate picture in Whitstable is slightly better than it was a day earlier, but not normal. Around 3,500 customers started seeing their supplies return on Friday evening, yet the company’s warning leaves open the question that matters most to households and businesses: when the town will get a full, reliable supply again. For now, the answer is not this weekend.
