Southern Water Freeze/Thaw Advice

Southern Water Freeze/Thaw Advice

Following the latest cold spell and with temperatures set to rise rapidly this weekend, Southern Water has reviewed its approach to supporting their customers in the event of a ‘freeze/thaw’ style event.

Southern Water will be reminding domestic and business customers to be on alert for bursts and leaks over the coming days, offering advice about how to prepare their properties and how to reach Southern Water in an emergency.

With a thaw predicted to in the next few days, the most important thing is to ensure people know where their stop cock is located, should they need to turn the water off in the event of a burst. Where is my stop tap? (southernwater.co.uk)

With businesses closing for the Christmas holidays, Southern Water is also urging business owners to turn off the water if their premises will be unoccupied over the holidays. For more tips on how to prepare for cold weather, visit: Retailer useful information (southernwater.co.uk)

There’s supporting information available at: Prepare your home for winter (southernwater.co.uk) and How to stop your pipes freezing and bursting in cold winter weather (southernwater.co.uk). Southern Water also posts regular updates on its social channels – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

In an emergency, customers can call Southern Water 24/7 on 0330 303 0368. Calls are charged at a local rate.

Southern Water has put in place a number changes across the business aimed at mitigating risk and improving its response to any incidents:

• Early and frequent communications to customers
• New measures to assess when severe weather is likely to have significant impact on water networks
• A complete overhaul of its incident management system, from identifying the potential for an incident, through preparation stages and actual incident handling to post-event management.
• Major investment to improve the resilience of our networks. In particular, Southern Water has added many more remote sensing devices to the water network to better monitor flows and deliver updates in real-time.
• Southern Water is also working more closely with Local Resilience Forums.