Residents on a Dagenham estate, reportedly including parents of young children and newborns, were left without water for almost 48 hours.

According to Steve Smith, who lives in the Millard Terrace estate, the water went out for some homes at around 2pm on Friday, March 17 and did not come back on until the morning of Sunday, March 19.

Steve claimed Barking and Dagenham Council only brought bottled water to people in the estate on Saturday at 10pm, more than 24 hours after the outage began.

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A spokesperson for the council responded, saying this was “not true” as the council was made aware of the situation on Friday afternoon and then “immediately had… staff and contractors on site”.

The spokesperson continued: “Staff and our contractors continued to work on remedying the situation into Saturday and were on site distributing water and chemical toilets to affected residents throughout the day.”

Steve said: “I’d been through 15 litres from Friday to Saturday morning because you couldn’t flush your toilet, wash your hands, all the things that are necessities…

“[There were] people up here with two, three kids and some with newborn babies that were in a right predicament and didn’t have the means that I had.”

A standpipe was installed on the Saturday by Essex and Suffolk Water.

Steve criticised the way the water outage was handled, claiming he was not told about the standpipe being installed or the water being turned back on by council staff but rather by neighbours. He described the council’s communication as “unacceptable”.

The council said that staff from its incident response unit were deployed to the block to let residents know what the situation was.

The council spokesperson added: “In addition, colleagues from the Red Cross also assisted with distributing water as well providing support to residents with additional vulnerabilities.

“Council staff were also on site throughout to speak to and update residents and where there was no response written communication was left with a number to contact.

“The council also opened a community assistance centre next door at Dagenham Library to give residents a place to go for updated information and to use the facilities in the building on Sunday morning, but the water supply was reinstated before this was needed by residents.

“The water supply was restored at 10.24am on Sunday and residents were duly informed as well as staff door knocking to check on their welfare.”