Thousands of properties are without water or have low pressure in parts of Surrey and London after a “large burst water main” disrupted supply.

Thames Water said it was making progress on repairing the burst in Molesey, which affected up to 15,000 properties in Thames Ditton, Esher, and Sunbury, plus other parts of Surrey and south London.

Long Ditton Infant and Nursery School and Thames Ditton Infant School, in Surrey, said they had closed for the day due to the issue first reported at about 05:15 BST.

A Thames Water spokesperson apologised to customers, adding it would “likely take some time to fix”, but the number of customers affected had reduced to 6,000.

Jane Allen, a resident of West Molesey, said she was awoken by a text from her next door neighbour at about 07:30 alerting her to the outage.

“We have none at all, it didn’t even trickle out a bit,” she said.

She added: “I have six bottles of water in the house, which will be fine for drinking but we won’t be able to do anything else.

“I think it will be awful [but] my next door neighbour’s mother is 90, so it will be much worse for her than it will be for me.”

Helen Ryder, who runs a flower shop in Thames Ditton, said: “Our priority is to make sure staff have water, but we need to make sure the flowers do too.

“Hopefully we have enough water, but people come before flowers.”

Thames Water said it would deliver water to registered vulnerable customers and open bottled water stations later, at locations yet to be confirmed.

Esher and Walton MP Monica Harding said she was “pushing for an urgent response” to the outage.

She told BBC Radio Surrey: “I was first made aware of it on my street WhatsApp group this morning when it went crazy to say there’s no water anywhere.

“We just need to get that water flowing again.”

The MP told the Local Democracy Reporting Service the “whole of the Wilderness is flooded” in Molesey.

“The teams working on the pipes have been brilliant, they’ve been working really hard but they are dealing with the fallout of a failed infrastructure,” she said.

In an update at 09:40, a spokeperson for Thames Water said: “Our specialist team is now on site and working to stop the water flooding from the broken pipe.

“We’ve rerouted water around the area and customers in the Surbiton area should begin to see their water return shortly, the pressure may be lower than normal, but this will return once we’ve fixed the broken pipe.”

Additional reporting by the Local Democracy Reporting Service

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