Water company washes its hands of water leak

 The jokers at Severn Trent sent me a letter from ‘Melissa (no surname)’ who is described as ‘Subject Matter Expert’ assuring me they investigated my report of a leak and found nothing. The letter said they visited my house; the leak is across a road three miles away.

I spoke to Melissa who said it was a templated letter, they had actually been to the site of the leak, carried out some tests and found it was only ‘groundwater’ so it was none of their business.

We discussed this at some length.

I don’t believe it’s only groundwater. They admit they have not found the source of the water and it hasn’t been flooding the road forever, only since last October. Surely that means it’s unlikely to be a newly-sprung spring.

Melissa denied she was, in effect saying that, though water might be a precious resource, Severn Trent don’t care enough to do something about it.

She said I should contact the Environment Agency or the Highways Agency. I demurred, suggesting she might like to contact them instead of me. She said she wasn’t able to do so because she didn’t know enough about the problem – even though she had just read me extracts of her engineer’s report about the water pouring across the road.

According to Melissa, Severn Trent has no responsibility for ‘groundwater’ even though it charges customers for ‘highway drainage’ and ‘wastewater and surface water drainage’. I suppose when the resource gets to the supplier free of charge one way or another, this fatuous monopoly doesn’t care how it comes by its ‘precious resource’. Never again should we take seriously the water companies’ bleating about how important it is to conserve water. They are only too keen to wash their hands of any responsibility.