On a Sunday travel day, a sudden power failure at a regional water treatment facility in southeast England triggered cascading disruptions that spilled over into one of the United Kingdom’s busiest international airports, Gatwick, leaving essential facilities nonfunctional and forcing food and beverage outlets to shut their doors.
The power outage hit SES Water’s Bough Beech Water Treatment Works, which serves communities across Kent and East Sussex. The incident caused a widespread drop in water system pressure, leading to temporary service interruptions for hundreds of domestic customers in the two counties, as well as critical infrastructure connected to the regional network, including Gatwick Airport, located just south of central London.
Within hours of the outage being reported, Gatwick Airport issued a public apology via the social media platform X to passengers traveling through both of its main terminals, acknowledging the significant inconvenience caused by the loss of water service. Airport officials noted that the facility had arranged to distribute bottled water to mitigate the impact of the outage, but that claim was immediately challenged by passengers on the ground.
Paul Lee, one of the thousands of passengers passing through Gatwick that day, told reporters that he had received no official announcements about the water shutdown and had not witnessed any bottled water being distributed to travelers. “For people who need to access restrooms, this situation is absolutely unacceptable,” Lee said in an interview with the BBC. “I’m fortunate that my flight is departing soon, so this won’t affect me for long, but for passengers with connections or departures still hours away, this is going to create major problems.”
Michael Dugher, a former British Member of Parliament, also documented the chaos on social media, noting that with all airport bars and restaurants closed due to the water outage, there was a severe shortage of available seating for waiting passengers. Many travelers were forced to sit directly on the terminal floor to wait out the disruption. Dugher called on Gatwick management to quickly reopen the closed dining and lounge spaces to ease the seating crunch and improve passenger comfort.
As of Sunday afternoon, SES Water confirmed that crews were working around the clock to restore full power and water pressure to all affected areas, but did not issue an immediate timeline for when service would return to normal.