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A “major incident” has been declared in Sheffield as thousands were left to brave freezing temperatures without gas in their homes.
Engineers have been scrambling to restore supplies for five days now in parts of the South Yorkshire city, after a burst water main damaged a gas pipe – sending hundreds of litres of water pouring into the network.
Gas supplies were said to have been restored on Tuesday to around a quarter of those impacted, after some 2,000 homes in the Stannington area were hit by the outage on Friday.
But with temperatures plunging below 0C overnight and thousands of people still left without heating or hot water, Sheffield City Council declared a major incident – with the outage said to have “spread further across the city” since Friday.
“Over the weekend we were alerted to a contained situation and have been assisting Cadent as best we can,” said Council leader Terry Fox. “Since then, the incident has progressed and spread further across the city.
“With a colder spell due in the coming days it is important we and other organisations across the city collaborate to ensure all the residents affected are provided with the support they require, especially the most vulnerable.
“By declaring a major incident, we will be better able to co-ordinate the overall response to the issues and call on additional support if needed.”
More than 100 engineers from gas firm Cadent have been working in Stannington and neighbouring Hillsborough since the weekend, going house to house to flush water out of the system and check homes, some of which saw liquid pouring from their gas meters and appliances.
In an update at 9pm on Tuesday, Cadent said its engineers had removed a further 200,000 litres of water that day, and managed to get a quarter of affected residents back on gas.
The Met Office has forecast that temperatures could plunge lower than -10C in parts of Britain in the coming days, and has issued a series of weather alerts for icy weather across the UK on Wednesday and Thursday.
The national forecaster has issued yellow weather alerts across parts of Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland on Wednesday and Thursday, and cautions that up to 2 inches of snow may fall at lower levels, with 4 inches on the hilltops.
Blizzard conditions and snow drifts are possible in the strong northerly winds, as daytime temperatures struggle to rise above 0C for large parts of the UK, the Met Office said.
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