You get up and go to the loo, only to find the flush doesn’t work. You try the shower, except nothing comes out.
You want a glass of water, but on turning the tap there is not a drop. Your day stumbles on, stripped of its essentials: no washing hands, no cleaning up the baby, neither tea nor coffee, no easy way to do the dishes or the laundry. Dirt accumulates; tempers fray.
The water company texts: we are so sorry; colleagues are working to restore connection; everything should soon be normal. You want to believe them, but the more it’s repeated, the more it becomes a kind of hold music. There’s no supply the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. Each morning brings with it the same chest-tightening question: what will happen today? Buckets and bottles don’t stop you feeling grubby and smelly, or from noticing the taint on your family and friends and neighbours. You’re not quite the people you thought you were and nothing feels normal.
For some of you reading this, statistics suggest the above has already happened to you, and recently. For others, the modelling implies it could soon be your future.
Last week, Tunbridge Wells went without running water for days on end, for the second time this winter. Over the course of this decade, the town has suffered a run of outages and on-off supply, or what South East Water is pleased to call “resilience issues”. The experiences above were shared by residents, including one woman who showed me some of the chats on her street’s WhatsApp group. Amid the neighbourly efforts to help one another, what jumps out is how quickly social norms break down.
Schools and GP surgeries are forced to shut, children’s birthday parties are cancelled. The WhatsApp threads almost thrum with anxiety: a bottling station has opened in this car park, the main road to another is gridlocked with queues, while yet another has run out. That Tesco has been stripped bare of water. An elderly relative who can’t carry a heavy pack of bottles leaves it on his doorstep, only to find the next morning it has been stolen. Hardly anyone goes out, and the high street turns ghostly.
One of the richest towns in one of the richest societies in human history shows the rest of us that even lavish private affluence cannot make up for the really important forms of public scarcity. Yet much of the coverage of Tunbridge Wells and East Grinstead last week treated their drought as a little local bad luck. That is how Britain’s establishment likes to treat its human-made disasters – anything from unemployment to knife crime – as sad news from peripheral places.
But as Mike Martin, the MP for Tunbridge Wells, observes: “South East Water may be the worst of all the water companies, but Thames Water comes second – and it serves millions of people. Water shortages will be coming to other parts of England very soon.”
Read more: The Guardian
