Thousands left without water

More than 1,000 Wigan homes were left without water after a technical fault with pumps last night and this morning.

United Utilities were contacted by 120 residents from the WN3, WN4 and WN5 with reports of either low water supply or none at all.

Engineers immediately got to work on the problem but it took time for it to be rectified and for taps to be running with water.

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An alert was put out on their website at 8.20pm saying “You may have noticed that water is coming out of your tap slower than usual or may have gone off altogether.

“We have one of our inspectors looking into this at the moment and as soon as we know what the cause of the problem is we’ll let you know.

“We’re sorry about this and we’re trying to get your taps flowing normally as quickly as we can. We’ll keep you posted as soon as we know what’s causing the problem.”

An update an hour later explained that the problem was taking longer to fix than expected.

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Water went off at around 8pm and was restored in the problem was fixed in the early hours of yesterday morning,

A United Utilities spokesman said: “Our apologies to customers for the interruption in water supplies on Thursday evening.

“This was caused by a technical fault on the pumps which move water through the local network.

“The issue was resolved in the early hours of Friday morning and supplies restored. We received just over 120 calls from customers reporting issues with their supply.”