FOLLOWING telephone calls from Councillor Frank Letch the County Councillor for Crediton and the Crediton Courier, and the excellent article in last week’s Courier (August 6), South West Water (SWW) engineers arrived in Oakfield Road, Crediton on (Monday, August 9) and within an hour had located the damaged water supply pipe which has been leaking for two years.

Apparently the SWW team which attended in August 2020 had not dug deep enough to uncover the problem!

Despite torrential downpours, which flooded their excavation requiring water to be pumped out, the engineers managed to wrap and tighten a “saddle” round the pipe to stop it leaking.

Local residents are delighted that the Courier’s intervention and “newspaper-power” has hopefully brought about a permanent cure to the problem. However, I do wonder how much drinking water has been lost during the past two years while the pipe has been leaking, and SWW has not been dealing effectively with the problem despite the many phone calls they have received from local residents.

Mike Turnbull