Water Leak due to broken external stopcock - who is liable

tazzajay23

Upon returning home from work on Monday I found my kitchen floor soaked and found the internal stopcock to be leaking water, the tap itself had seized and I was unable to turn the flow off. I went to my external stopcock to find that too was broken with the tap just spinning - either increasing the flow or keeping as was.

I called Southern Water who put me on a 2 hour emergency, the person who arrived was unable to fix it, so they had to call out the contractors to replace the entire unit - another 2 hours later. My pavement and part of my driveway was dug up by Southern Water and they finally turned the water off. So my house was continuing to flood during this time. I did call an emergency plumber who was unable to fix the internal leak and did not have the equipment to freeze the pipe to stop the flow internally.

This has left me with damaged flooring to the ground floor of my house. The insurers are saying Southern Water are to blame due to the faulty external stop !!!!. Southern Water want me to put it all in writing to them and they will investigate.

Any advice on this would be appreciated on where I stand with this!

Robin9

The root cause of your flood was your faulty internal stopcock. The Southern Water problem didn't help.

Over to your insurance.