United Utilities Cryptospiridium contamination

karljt2013

We live in the North West where United Utilities have advised customers in nearly 100,000 homes to boil their water for drinking, brushing teeth, salad washing, general food preparation and making ice until further notice. This warning is expected to last until early next week at the earliest. This warning has been in effect for nearly 30 hours already

Today we went to the supermarket for 50 litres of still water and it was all sold out so we had to buy fizzy water instead.

What are our rights with regards to compensation for the inconvenience caused. None of our family have experienced any ill symptoms but cryptospiridium is an incredibly nasty bug and hard to kill as well.

We are currently paying around £60.00 per month for our water services and we want compensating and we need to know how to go about it.

JJ_Egan

Write to the water company in the first instance .
But the T&C may cover them bar a small sum in compensation .

You can of course take legal action try Compensationcowboys.com

spiro

Why aren't you boiling the water as advised rather than going out and buying bottled water? As said read the t&cs but I suspect as they have issued a warning you won't get anything.

C_Mababejive

Cryptospiridium contamination is usually caused by run off from farm land into local water courses . The run off will be cow poo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptosporidium

Boxman

karljt2013 wrote: »

We are currently paying around £60.00 per month for our water services and we want compensating and we need to know how to go about it.

Don't think that the Scousers are affected by this.

Tigsteroonie

50 litres of water? What were you going to do, bathe in it? AFAIK the advice is to boil water used for drinking, cooking, cleaning teeth - i.e. anything where you ingest; but there's no problem with skin contact.

System

From UU's website:

Q. Will you compensate me for the bottled water I have bought?
A. The advice we are giving is that your water can be used after you have boiled it.

Q. Will you pay compensation?
A. Our focus is on returning water supplies to normal as quickly as possible. We will look into compensation once everything is back to normal.

JJ_Egan

Compo.
We will get it back on next years bill .

Marktheshark

They made redundancies of "On the job hands on experts" and their supervisors and now will realise you can not manage a water supply by talking on the phone.

Blackpool_Saver

http://www.unitedutilities.com/lancashire-boiled-water.aspx

lisa110rry

For anyone who lives in the southern part of the affected area, if you cross the river you will find there is plenty of bottled water as we are not affected. Which, given the number of care homes in the area is a huge relief.

For the avoidance of doubt, I think if we were affected I would prefer to drink bottled water rather than boiled water. Miind you in this heat, I'm currently sipping a little bottle of beer!