Hi everybody, what’s your view/advice about this?
Last Thursday the water main in the pavement about 200 metres from my property burst. As luck would have it the burst was immediately adjacent to an Openreach chamber and ducts. The burst was so violent that it moved the concrete lid of the chamber. The water flooded the road.
I advised both Openreach and the water company by telephone, and OR arrived within the hour. However (and not surprisingly) OR phoned me later to inform me to say that they were unable to do anything due to the violence of the leak and that the ball was in the water company’s court.
Needless to say the water company were a no show and it took 2 further calls and a wait of over 12 hours before their sub contractors arrived. In the meantime the water continued to flood out of the OR duct. The sub contractors opened the pavement, slowed the leak, and then quit with the excavation left open.
On Saturday I walked up the road and peered into the trench. The repair was obviously temporary – water was still leaking but now only a trickle. However the OR duct chamber immediately adjacent has (to my eyes) been severely damaged. The burst has displaced a number of bricks lining the chamber, and it looks to me that the chamber itself is full of silt.
Despite all this the phone and FTTC service to my property has stayed up. (I have BT phone and Infinity 2). However although there is no noise audible on the phone line, my Infinity service has degraded. Where I used to previously get 38up/8down I now get about 20up/5down (if I’m very lucky).
I’m convinced that the leak has caused this degradation in service. But BT will not now accept a fault report on Infinity as my speeds are apparently still above the threshold for fault acceptance.
As you can imagine I’m very annoyed over this – my Infinity service could now remain stuck at a lower speed. I would have been better off if the service had failed completely.
The trench remains open and the leak continues – albeit at a trickle now.