Residents at four blocks of flats in Maidstone are now on their fourth day without a water supply.

The taps finally ran dry early on Tuesday morning, although the residents were also without water for part of Sunday and again for part of Monday. They have remained off since as contractors struggle to fix a problem with the pumps that maintain water pressure to to the properties.

The problem is not with the mains supply of water from the street, which is unaffected, but rather with the internal pumping system that services the flats.

One resident said:"Exactly the same thing happened in 2017 , when we were again without water for four days.

"There's clearly an ongoing issue that hasn't been properly resolved."

The 95 flats are looked after by the Prime Property Management, who have arranged for residents to receive 10 litres of bottled water per flat daily for drinking purposes and have also supplied a water bowser in the courtyard, so that residents can fill buckets to flush their toilets, but baths or showers are out.

More worrying for residents is that there is no certainty when the problem will be resolved.

They have been told a temporary fix might be possible to give them some water later today, but not full pressure.

Stephen Wiles, a director with Prime Property Management, said: "Water for the flats is held in tank and there is a water booster to pump it up to the properties.

"The pump room is underground and unfortunately there was a leak which caused it to become flooded and that caused the electrical equipment to fail.

"There's been a delay because our engineers were reluctant to enter the flooded pump-room until they were certain the electricity supply had been turned off.

"Fortunately the flooding has now been cleared and we are working on fixing the faults.

"That might take a week or so.

"In the meantime, we are hopeful we will restore water to the flats later this afternoon by connecting directly to the mains supply.

"The pressure may only by 50 to 70% of normal during peak-use periods, but it will be usable."

Mr Wiles said his company was not the management company at the time when the previous outage occurred.

He said: “We are aware of the previous fault in 2017, but were not managing at that time. We do not believe this latest incident to be an ongoing or related fault to the previous occasion.

“We are working hard with the engineers to ensure a speedy and full restoration of the water supply. We are in close contact with the residents and have supplied temporary water provisions until a supply is restored.”

The residents pay for the maintenance of the properties through an annual service charge.

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