Corporate failure strikes Mill Hill

Yesterday was the busiest ever Sunday for hits on this blog. Sunday is normally the day when I get least hits. Why you may wonder? Well when I woke up, we had no water in our taps. I was told by a neighbour that a water main had burst at Apex Corner. As I had to take my son to football, I thought I'd see what happened when I got home.

I returned home at 1pm to find no water in my taps. I checked the local paper. No news. I had a look at Barnet Council website. No news. I looked at the Vieolia Water website. This directed me to a page where I could type in my postcode and see if there was service disruption. This I did. No service disruption. I then had a brainwave. I typed in the address of a friend in Edgware (the post code where the water main had burst). This told me that Mill Hill (my postcode) would have no water for the foreseeable future.

I posted the details on the blog, just in case anyone else googled "No Water in Mill Hill". I got over 1,000 hits on that. Later I posted an update. Veolia Water said that they would deliver bottled water to three locations in Mill Hill later. I'd already bought some at this point. I do like a cup of tea whilst I watch football and eat lunch.

Service was resumed sometime after 7pm. This morning I read the story on the Hendon Times. They said that the emergemcy bottled water had only made it to one location. All of it went at Wise Lane. I wrote to the top councillors and CEO of Barnet Council asking why they had posted nothing on their website. Surely a note explaining to residents what was happening would have been helpful. Remarkably, I got a "Nothing to do with us Guv'nor" response from Nick Walkley CEO. Of course I knew it wasn't their fault, but a bit of information would surely have not gone amiss. Here's Walkley's reply :-

Mr Tichborne

Thank you for your email.

The Council did respond through its emergency planning process to a serious flooding incident in the Broadfields/Hale Lane area this morning. A number of properties were flooded, some seriously, as a result of a burst water main. Officers attended to support the emergency services at the scene.

The on-call Officer raised your concerns about a lack of information for Mill Hill residents on the Veolia website. Our communications lead contacted Veolia's Director of Communications this afternoon to alert them to the growing need for further resident information as the length of time without supply extended. Throughout this time (as indicated on their website) Veolia have remained confident of restoring supplies today.

Our latest information is that repairs have been completed but that it will take until later in the evening for all affected households to receive supply and this may be at a lower pressure than normal. Veolia's website will continue to provide updates. I do hope this means all household will have their supply restored shortly.

Water supply is not the responsibility of the Council and we do not become involved in every water supply issue. However should this have become an extended incident the Council would have enacted its emergency procedures working with Veolia to identify vulnerable residents, providing rest centres where necessary and sharing Veolia and other information updates with Residents through the website and by liaison with the local press.

Nick Walkley

I had no water for approx 12 hours. Not everyone has bottled water in house. Not everyone can get to the shops. No one seemed to know what was going on unless they knew to check Veolia website and enter an Edgware post code. In short it was  a complete corporate failure.

In a recent comment on this blog, a former Conservative Councillor stated that my comments about "outsourcing and privatisation" were typical of those of the left. He claimed that privatisation was the cure of all ails. He said :-

Privatisation was all about cheaper services but more importantly about providing choice. Now you can shop around for gas, electricity and telephone services.

Ask anyone in Mill Hill today what they think of privatised water supplies? Even a Tory Council candidate who lives over the road was moaning about "selling water to the French" yesterday. This is just a foretaste of what we will see when Barnet privatises all of its services under the OneBarnet program. The main concept of OneBarnet is to outsource all but core strategic central services. It has been tried before. That was the business model for Railtrack. We all know what happened there, don't we.

I suggest we give Barnet a new name BarnetTrack.