Burst water main hits homes and closes schools

Some homes are without water and schools have been forced to close in parts of Surrey after an outage caused by a "large burst water main".

Thames Water said it was investigating the issue, first reported at about 05:15 BST, affecting Thames Ditton, Esher, and Sunbury, plus other parts of the county and South West London.

Long Ditton Infant and Nursery School and Thames Ditton Infant School said on their websites they had closed for the day as they were without a supply.

A spokesperson for the water company apologised to customers, adding it would "likely take some time to fix", but that water for some properties was being re-routed.

Jane Allen, a resident of West Molesey, said she was awoken by a text from her next door neighbour at about 07:30 alerting her to the outage.

"We have none at all, it didn't even trickle out a bit," she said.

She added: "I have six bottles of water in the house, which will be fine for drinking but we won't be able to do anything else.

"I think it will be awful [but] my next door neighbour's mother is 90, so it will be much worse for her than it will be for me."

Helen Ryder, who runs a flower shop in Thames Ditton, said: "Our priority is to make sure staff have water, but we need to make sure the flowers do too.

"Hopefully we have enough water, but people come before flowers."

Esher and Walton MP Monica Harding said she was "pushing for an urgent response" to the outage.

She told BBC Radio Surrey: "I was first made aware of it on my street WhatsApp group this morning when it went crazy to say there's no water anywhere.

"We just need to get that water flowing again."

In an update at 09:40, a spokeperson for Thames Water said: "Our specialist team is now on site and working to stop the water flooding from the broken pipe.

"We've rerouted water around the area and customers in the Surbiton area should begin to see their water return shortly, the pressure may be lower than normal, but this will return once we've fixed the broken pipe."

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