A NEW hotline set up by Three Valleys Water to tackle the district's leaks, drips and minor floods has been denounced as a sham by one resident who has waited almost two weeks for repairs.

Mrs Helen Whitehouse of Vernon Close, St Albans, rang the Leakspotters Line on Friday, July 13, after awaking to find a stream of water gushing down her street.

Despite a Three Valleys engineer visiting the scene next day to examine the problem and drawing a blue line around the sodden area, no work has yet been carried out and gallons of water has been allowed to run into the drains.

Speaking this week, Mrs Whitehouse said: "The Leakspotters Line doesn't work, this leak has been reported about ten times and is still being allowed to flood the road. If it goes on much longer it will cause the pavement to subside."

Mrs Whitehouse is not the only resident to have called Three Valleys to report the problem. Mr Leslie Payne, whose front garden backs onto the leak has also called the company.

"For the first week the sound of rushing water through the cistern woke us up every night and it must be even worse for the people living above," he said.

Mr Payne and his wife have been forced to keep their bathroom door shut to block out the noise, which has gradually lessened as the amount of water escaping from the leak has risen.

He added: "The pavement is completely sodden and when you stand on it, it sinks slightly and even more water bubbles out."

Despite receiving complaints from more than four of the homes in Vernon Close over the past ten days, Three Valleys Water claim the problem is of low priority.

A spokesman for the company said: "This was a leaking stop tap so it was obviously not a high priority but it is due to be repaired on Friday, July 27.

"We do have a large backlog in the St Albans area because the high water table has meant that some of the leaks reported to us are not actually leaks at all.

"Every leak that comes in to us is investigated and we aim to deal with 100 per cent of calls within ten days, however because of the backlog we are actually operating at about 95 per cent at the moment."

The company has publicly re-launched its Leakspotters Line in a bid to conserve some of the millions of gallons of water lost each year through leaking pipes.

St Albans Mayor John Peters even lent his face to the campaign, appearing in last week's Review newspaper pretending to call the hot-line.

Asked this week what he thought about the company's slow response to residents' calls, he said: "A big part of the campaign was to get people to report leaks in the first place.

"It's disappointing that they don't seem to be responding very quickly to repairing the leaks but there do seem rather a lot around at the moment."