Burst pipe causes flood chaos (From Oxford Mail)

Burst pipe causes flood chaos

6:10pm Monday 20th July 2009 in

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A BURST pipe flooded a house in Northway, Oxford, and left dozens of people without water.

Firefighters from Rewley Road and The Slade were called to pump water out of the house in Maltfield Road at about 4am today.

The homeowner, who did not want to be named, said: “My house is totally ruined. The water was just flooding in from both doors of the house and swirling around inside.

“It’s so shocking, it came like a bolt out of the blue.”

Thames Water was called to stem the flow of water and within an hour had fixed the burst pipe.

But while they were mending the problem, water pressure built up in the system and caused another pipe to burst at the junction of Maltfield Road and Westlands Drive, above, leaving dozens of households, including residents in Plowman Tower, with no mains water.

Households were able to get drinking water from a standpipe while the problems were fixed.

Thames Water spokesman Simon Evans said: “Our engineers fixed the pipe but when they built the water pressure back up, having reduced it to fix the problem, another burst happened.

“This sometimes happens and unfortunately it happened today.

“The second burst was then fixed.

“While fixing that, we had to cut off the water supply again which led to a number of additional properties being temporarily cut off while it was fixed.

“We fixed it successfully the second time around and water supply was returned to all properties by midday.”