Friday, September 04, 2020

The Great Hole of Creeting St Peter...

It is, as they say, never-endingly exciting here in Creeting St Peter.

Anglian Water had visited about two weeks ago to do some work at the northern end of the village but, afterwards, a leak had developed in the centre of the village. You know how it is with systems, you fix one thing and a weakness elsewhere appears. I didn’t think too much of it at the time. However, when it appeared to be getting worse, I thought that I ought to see if Anglian Water were aware of the problem.

They’ve got an app, so I checked for reports and, to my surprise, discovered that it appeared not to have been notified. And so, as a responsible citizen, I marked the spot on the online map, wrote a brief explanation of the problem, and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

Jordan rang me within half an hour, asked a few questions and, once I had convinced him that this was seemingly unrelated to the long running drama which is the leak south of the bridge over the A14 to the south of the village, he advised that he would come out and take a look. Two hours or so later, Jordan rang again to confirm that we had a leak. Engineers would be assessing it shortly, he said.

This morning, men turned up in white Anglian Water vans, closed the road through the village, and dug a big hole in the road where the leak was. It might have been nice if they had told anyone they were coming, but we did get an automated telephone call when it proved necessary to turn off the water supply to two-thirds of the residents.

Fortunately, the water was only off for about three hours, but the road is still closed and likely to be so for a few days yet, based on the size of the hole they’ve left and the fact that a permanent junction pipe needs to be fitted.

In the meantime, the village is cut in half with the only access from one side to the other being on foot. At least, as one resident said, we haven’t had anyone speeding through the village all day...

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