You may have noticed the slow water leak coming from the grass verge outside Despard House, which runs across the pavement and on Palace Road opposite the primary school – It’s hard to miss it!
The leak started at the end of July/August this year. PRERA reported the leak to Thames Water initially, in the hope that the leak was coming from a Thames Water owned Communication pipe (see diagram below). If the leaking pipe was Thames Water’s responsibility, they would have had to carry out the repair without any direct cost implications to residents at Despard House. PRERA’s intentions is always to keep costs down for residents.
Thames Water took a very long time to find the leak, and then establish whether the leak was their responsibility or not. It took them 6+ visits in order to firstly identify where the leak was, and then they had a bit of passing the buck between their clean water team and the foul water team. Eventually around the beginning of October Thames Water confirmed that the leak was not their responsibility; The leak is coming from a Lambeth owned supply pipe (see diagram).
PRERA reported the leak to Lambeth at the start of October and Lambeth raised a job for jetting to be carried out on the week of the 7th Oct. While this initially seemed to have solved the problem, a few days later the leak started again. We again reported the leak to Lambeth, who sent out a large jetting tanker which jetted the drains on the 8th November. This seems to have finally resolved the issue, and since 11th November there have been not further leaks. We have not received clarity of what caused the leak in the first place or how we can avoid recurring issues in the future.
There are no plans currently to clean the pavement or restore the damaged grass verge. PRERA is currently researching options that do not involve any cost to residents.