Hundreds left without heating and hot water as four city tower blocks hit by outage in Sheffield city centre
Hundreds of city centre residents in four tower blocks were left without heating and hot water following an outage.
Veolia, which supplies heat to a number of flats in the city centre as part of the District Heating Programme, carried out works on the network on Thursday evening (January 15) to connect a new customer.
Following the works, heating and hot water supplies were lost to Hanover Tower on Exeter Drive and three tower blocks at Leverton Gardens on Cemetery Road.
Hanover Tower on Exeter Drive contains 118 homes, including 89 two-bedroom and 29 one-bedroom properties, while the three tower blocks at Leverton Gardens on Cemetery Road each contain 56 two-bedroom apartments.
Based on average household sizes, it is estimated that around 700 to 900 residents were affected by the loss of heating and hot water.
Speaking to The Star, a source said: “There are many families with young children and babies, also many elderly and vulnerable tenants.
“This heat supply has been off overnight.”
Veolia confirmed the outage was caused by a fault discovered when the system was restarted.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Veolia said: “We are very sorry for the disruption to residents’ heating and hot water in the Balm Green area.
“We carried out repairs to a small part of the network on Thursday evening and notified all affected parties ahead of time. Whilst the maintenance works were successful, when the system was restarted our teams discovered a leak that caused an outage to several buildings.
“As of 7pm on Friday 16 January we can confirm the network (was) fully back online.
“Faults on the network are very rare and our teams have been working incredibly hard to fix the issue, replace the defective pipework and continue to monitor the system to ensure no further issues occur.”