WATER pipes burst in a number of houses and businesses in Bamburgh on Monday, causing substantial amounts of flooding and damage in the affected properties.
The cause of the problem was a sudden increase in water pressure, which came about while Northumbrian Water staff carried out routine inspection and cleaning work in the area.
Sarah Holmes, owner of The Greenhouse B&B on Front Street, told the A
dvertiser: "My main worry is that there is a huge number of holiday lets in the village and their owners won't know about it.
"There are also a lot of second homes in the village, so that is a worry too.
"It happened about 1.30pm on Monday, when I heard this sound and thought that the fish tank was making a funny noise, but then I realised it wasn't that.
"The water was pouring through the ceiling. I ran upstairs and located the burst pipe and turned off the water. It had blown a pipe off the back of a toilet."
She said her husband came home, fixed the pipe and turned the water back on, but on returning downstairs they found water pouring through the ceiling in the hallway.
"We went back upstairs," added Mrs Holmes, "and the same thing had happened to another toilet in another one of the en-suite rooms.
"The water had probably been running for up to half an hour and it was coming out at double the pressure of normal so it was absolutely flooding through, but it is drying out not too badly now, but obviously we can't let any rooms and there are cracks in the ceiling."
She added that other businesses and homes in the village had also been hit by the problem.
A spokeswoman for Northumbrian Water said: "Northumbrian Water had been carrying out essential routine work to inspect and clean one of our service reservoirs, which are big storage tanks that supply treated water and that act as break of pressure on the network.
"Because we were carrying out this work, we had to bypass this reservoir with a pipe and made use of a pressure reducing valve, but unfortunately, for about an hour, it didn't operate as it should have done so the pressure increased from around three bar to just over five bar."
She added: "Five bar is not considered to be an excessive pressure at all. A large majority of our network supplies up to 10 bar pressure and internal pipe work in our network should be able to cope with more than five bar pressure."
The company received eight calls in relation to the problem, four of them to do with internal pipe breaks.
