Green Party and SOS protesters gathered outside Thanet District Council offices on Tuesday as Southern Water executives arrived to face questions from the TDC’s Overview and Scrutiny Panel.

Green Councillor Mike Garner spoke at the meeting and vented the anger felt by many Thanet residents towards the water company because of the recent outages in the water supply and the horribly frequent dumping of raw sewage into the sea.

The outages had caused real hardship to many residents especially the elderly and vulnerable members of the community. And the one on 19-20^th December, which the company admits lasted for more than 24 hours, should have triggered a payment of £60 to all residents.

As for the company’s long-term infrastructure plan Mike continued,

“We all know that, as it stands, Southern Water’s Water Supply and Treatment infrastructure is not fit for purpose. If it were, we would not have had frequent water outages over the last few months and you would not be regularly pumping sewage off our coastline, as has been happening, and not improving, for a number of years now. As reported by SOS Whitstable, in the 167 hours that elapsed between Episodes 1 and 2 of Paul Whitehouse’s ‘Our Troubled Rivers’ series, you released 931 hours worth of sewage into the waterways across the South East. A normal week for Southern Water? This is completely unacceptable.”