Stannington: Gas restored to every accessible home, Cadent says

Gas engineers have been working through the night to restore supply

Engineers have restored gas to virtually all of the 2,000 homes in Sheffield which lost supply 13 days ago, distributor Cadent has said.

Only houses to which workers have been unable to gain access remained cut off, the company said on Thursday.

Engineers are now working to restore supply to the last commercial premises still disconnected from the network.

The properties in Stannington and Malin Bridge have had no gas since a burst water main flooded pipes on 2 December.

Spokeswoman Stephanie van Rosse told the BBC: "We believe we have visited every domestic property, so everybody's homes, and if people were in we were able to switch them back on.

"We do know that there are some commercial properties still without gas but our priority has absolutely [been] to get the heat on in people's homes."

'Resilient community'

Cadent said on Wednesday that 196 properties, mostly industrial, remained without gas.

Engineers have visited the last remaining homes four or five times in an attempt to get access and have left cards asking residents to call the company when they return.

Ms van Rosse said Cadent's staff would remain in the area "for the next couple of weeks or so" removing the last of 1.3 million litres of water from the network and repairing boilers.

She thanked locals for being "resilient" after the gas outage left residents without central heating or cookers during freezing weather.

The gas network was flooded by more than 1.3 million litres of water

Meanwhile, Yorkshire Water has defended itself from criticism over the 50-year-old pipe which flooded the gas network.

Local residents and Olivia Blake, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, have accused the company of failing to invest in infrastructure.

Zoe Burns-Shore, Yorkshire Water's director of customer experience, said 1970s pipes "aren't unusual" in the UK's water network "but bursts still do happen, especially when the weather is cold".

Water pipes are subject to "really sophisticated monitoring" for problems and engineers had fixed the broken main in Stannington within two hours of the leak being detected, she added.

The company said it would await the findings of an independent investigation into leak to establish if it should act to prevent similar problems in the future.

Ms Burns-Shore added: "We still don't know why the main burst - it looks a very, very unusual situation - and we don't know how that water could have got into the gas main so quickly."