A Walsall housing association has apologised to residents after leaving them without running water for hours on two separate occasions within a fortnight. Residents living in Humphries House tower block in Brownhills were affected, with the mostly elderly tenants unable to flush toilets, take medication with a drink, or enjoy a cup of tea.
Impact on Residents
Several residents have carers who were unable to carry out personal care during the outages. One resident said she had stockpiled around a dozen large bottles of water because of the recurring issue. On April 13, occupants reported being without water from the early hours of the morning until 4pm. Then on April 23, they were without water again from the early hours until before midday.
Councillor Vera Waters, standing as an independent candidate in the Aldridge North and Walsall Wood ward, demanded that lessons be learnt. She said: “The tenants can’t wash, bathe, cook, wash up or wash their clothes. We’ve got more than 100 people in this block of flats who have been without water. It’s a bare essential. It’s something you need to live. It’s a necessity of life.”
Cllr Waters added: “WHG are not learning lessons. This has gone on but they’ll just continue and go round in a circle. They need to have policies and procedures in place for something like this and not leave people that long.”
Previous Incidents
Cllr Waters and Humphries House tenants said the water was off for five days in November last year. On that occasion, WHG brought bottled water to residents, but they claim there wasn’t enough to go around. Resident Damien Ayris, 45, said he realised there was a problem last week when he woke to use the toilet at 5.30am. He said: “I phoned up WHG, they said someone will be there in around an hour. Three hours later I called them again. It’s an emergency. There’s no other water at that time in the morning, not even Tesco is open.”
Another resident, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “They need to get it sorted and do the job properly. Do the repairs and make sure it lasts. There is one person in here with feeding tubes, and they have to wash their equipment out all the time. The water’s always been a problem. It’s not just once it’s on a regular basis. It never changes. It will happen again, I can guarantee it.”
WHG Response
Rob Gilham, corporate director of strategy, assets and transformation, said: “We’d like to apologise to our customers at Humphries House who have experienced two disruptions to the water supply in recent weeks. We know the impact that having no water has on our customers and treat all such reports as an emergency.
“On 13 April we received a report from customers about a loss of supply and arranged for our contractors to investigate. They were on site within a few hours and were able to restore supply. When a second loss of supply was reported to us on 23 April, again we responded quickly and had fully restored water to all customers during the morning.
“These incidents appear to be linked to an intermittent fault with the building’s water pumps. We are carrying out a full investigation to identify the cause and prevent any reoccurrences. We’ll update customers once this work is complete and confirm any further actions that are required.”
