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Britain is short of water, and still at risk of flooding, in the same week

Writer: Slightly Anxious
Slightly Anxious
Oct 21
4 min read
A split illustration: a dry, cracked garden with a coiled hose on one side, and water gently rising at a front doorstep on the other, in the Slightly Anxious house style.

Author: Slightly Anxious Date: 5th October 2026 Time to read: 4 minutes

Slightly Anxious is here to help you turn any crisis into a manageable adventure — for you and everyone you care about.


Britain managed a particularly British trick this week: it stayed properly short of water, and still found a fresh way to worry about having too much of it! Ten water companies now have hosepipe bans running at once, covering roughly thirty million people, while the Environment Agency says two million English households have no idea they are sitting on a flood risk. Both things are true. Neither cancels the other out.


A hosepipe ban is the visible part. Losing water you already have is the quiet part


The Environment Agency's own weekly drought report has reservoir storage across England at 55 percent of capacity, almost one-fifth below where it should be for the time of year, with ten of its areas still formally in drought. South East Water has gone further than most, extending its ban across Sussex and removing the exemption that used to let elderly and vulnerable customers water their gardens regardless. That is not a story about lawns. It is a story about a water company that thinks the squeeze is tight enough to stop making exceptions, even for people who could really use one.


None of which stopped the taps finding their own way to fail anyway. A burst Thames Water main left around 15,000 homes in Thames Ditton and Esher without supply this week and closed schools while it was fixed, and Anglian Water had to run drop-in sessions in Kirton in Lindsey after an outage hit 36,000 customers there. A hosepipe ban and a burst main have nothing to do with each other, strictly speaking; one is drought, the other is an old pipe giving up. But from where you are standing in your kitchen with the tap running dry, the difference is academic.


Ten litres of water, kept somewhere boring, per person, per day, turns either kind of outage from a crisis into an inconvenience. That is the whole case for ‘What to do when the water has been turned off with Slightly Anxious’ in one sentence, and it is well worth doing this week in particular, while South East Water is actively telling its most vulnerable customers they are on their own.


Two million people are sitting on the opposite problem, and do not know it


At almost the same moment, the Environment Agency revealed that two million properties in England are at flood risk without their owners being aware of it, and is urging people to check gov.uk and sign up for warnings. Aviva's chief executive, Amanda Blanc, added a sharper edge to it a day earlier: flood risk is “absolutely increasing”, in her words, and new homes in at-risk areas could end up uninsurable altogether. No flood warnings are live in England as we write this; the last one, in Cumbria, was lifted a few days ago. The risk the Environment Agency is talking about is not this week's weather. It is the postcode you already live in.


Checking it takes about two minutes on the government's own flood map, and costs nothing! Knowing it changes what belongs in your grab bag, where you keep important documents, and whether ‘Slightly Anxious about rising water levels’ is background reading or something to actually plan around. Two million households currently think it is the former when it might be the latter, and that gap is the whole opportunity here.


What it adds up to


A hosepipe ban is a nuisance, a burst main is an afternoon, and an unchecked flood risk is nothing at all, right up until it is everything. None of the three, on its own, is much of a story. Together, in the same seven days, they say something plainer than any of them manage alone: the water coming out of the wall and the water that might come in under the door are both worth ten minutes of attention you probably have not given them, and neither needs you to wait for an emergency to get started.


That is rather the point of ‘Slightly Anxious says Get a Grab Bag!’, and it is why we keep coming back to the same ten-litre figure whatever the specific crisis of the week turns out to be. Check your flood risk this weekend! Put a few bottles somewhere boring. Do not wait for South East Water, or your own roof, to make the decision for you. It really is a manageable adventure, not a drama, as long as you start before you need to.


Remember, keep calm and visit us here.


Sources


This blog post has been AI-assisted with human oversight

 
 
 

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