Yesterday saw folk turn up to repair the neighbours path. Lots of head scratching was involved when they realised the problem hadn’t been solved, but they proceeded apace anyway.
We still had lots of water in our garden, so I phoned up Scottish Water once more to find out what was going on. To cut a tediously long story short, for reasons unknown to man or beast, our call wasn’t flagged as ‘urgent’ in anyway (despite their adding “emergency” priority to our requests for their man Frank to come back and check), and the dispatched was putting visits off to the end of the week. When I explained we had water in our foundations (ok, sub-floor, but folk don’t seem to ‘get’ sub-floor), the penny finally dropped on one of their call centre staff, and we were bumped up the priority list.
It also transpired that there were two ‘tickets’ against our problem. The one opened nearly two weeks ago by me, and the one opened that morning (I suspect) by the company that had tried to find the problem in the neighbours garden. That the ticket was ‘new’ makes me worried that the company ruining the neighbours path wasn’t notifying Scottish Water as they had implied. I called up to advise them of the two reference numbers to make sure things tallied. Not sure it necessarily helped, but at least eased my worries that there were two separate issues as far as they were concerned.
Anyway, SW bloke turned up yesterday to look at the situation and concur it was on the street, and scheduled a crew to come this morning. And come they (eventually) did, and proceeded to cut pavement, dig holes and change pipe before disappearing. SW bloke turned up this afternoon to check, and agreed it had been done and that the water at the bottom of the hole was from a land-drain or somesuch, not the pipe. But we now have a front garden that’s (relatively) dry.
So tomorrow or the next day the hole should be filled. But that still leaves our neighbours with a cut up front path, with a new blob of fresh concrete in their path, for an exploratory dig that hadn’t been necessary given the sonar guy had implied it was close to the wall anyway. Lots of ruined plants. We’re as we were, but I’m furious it took so long, and was seemingly reliant on one over worked chap to come out and concur it was Scottish Water’s problem, plus the breakdown in communication that was going on between everybody, not least the call-centre staff and the dispatchers, for not understanding the severity of the problem.
Letters will be written, so it’s not the end of the story. I expect my neighbour is going to do the same. Two weeks to plug a hole. But at least it’s plugged.
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September 9th, 2006 at 12:57 am
Yippee, you made it. Stickability is what you have.