Botched meter fitting leads to couple's kitchen flooding and months without water in house

Tracey Bradley is a night duty end-of-life care nurse and is at the end of her tether after months of having to drive for miles to her mum's to wash her uniform.

Mrs Bradley and her husband David live near Newport and were required to replace an old but reliable water meter with a modern one that provides readings electronically.

Since May they have had six visits from engineers from Severn Trent's contractors but on Saturday banned the company from making another visit to their property.

It has left them having to use an outdoor stopcock to fill buckets and take them inside.

She said: "The engineer badly fitted the wrong meter inside my kitchen.

"It damaged the stop cock and mains supply pipe. That was in May."

She said different engineers have not been able to repair it.

"My kitchen has flooded three times and I am frightened at having electric cables under water.

"I am a community night duty, end-of-life nurse and have to wash in a bowl of water after 10-hour duty shifts and have to go to my mom's to boil wash my uniforms."

Mr Bradley said: "Tracey is a well known and respected end-of-life nurse. She cares for people in their own homes when they are dying.

"She's been left to carry a bucket of water into the house and drive miles to get her uniforms washed. You can't have any risk of cross infection in her job"

Mrs Bradley added: "The last engineer told me to just turn on the outside stopcock, fill a bucket or can quickly and turn it off again quickly. This in a flooded cupboard full of electric cables!

"They can't repair the damage they've done and keep walking away.

"I'm afraid they will have to dig up and replace my kitchen to fit a new supply pipe because they've repeatedly cut the old one. All this just for a water meter than when done properly took five minutes to screw in."

A spokesperson for Severn Trent Water said: "We’re incredibly sorry to Mr and Mrs Bradley for the issues they’ve had since having a water meter fitted by our contractors .

"The experience they’ve had is not what we’d expect from anyone working on our behalf, and we’re committed to making sure we put things right and address the issues raised.

"Severn Trent were first made aware of the problem on Friday and we’ve since spoken with Mr Bradley and are attempting to arrange for a meeting with ourselves, Mr Bradley and the contractors to ensure we can achieve a positive resolution as quickly as possible.”

Mr Bradley said he was pleased in terms of 'getting things moving' on the issue and they are due to have a meeting today (Wednesday, 7) to try to make progress.

But he added that the water company's claim that it was first aware of the issue on Friday was "complete nonsense".

"Every time we rang up Severn Trent they kept putting us through to the contractors," he said.