Residents across Reading have shared their outrage at being left without water for four days despite Thames Waters' reassurance that engineers were "working hard to fix" the issue.

On Saturday, January 20, RG8 and RG31 reported water outages and low pressure. Just a couple of hours later RG1 and RG30 also reported issues.

In the following days, residents shared how they were unable to do simple things like flushing the toilet or getting a glass of water.

Jessica Dibley took to X, formerly Twitter, and said: "I can't leave my house and desperately need water. There is nothing coming out of my taps and it's gone over 24 hours. Not being able to flush the toilet is disgusting and a health and safety issue."

Another X user said: "People have work tomorrow morning and would want to shower. I can't even wash my hands or brush my teeth. This is horrible."

Other residents have described the water outage as "absurd" as some were left dealing with young children, babies and toddlers with no water.

Thames Water opened water stations at Meadway Sports Centre and Tesco Extra on Napier Road, giving free water bottles to those affected by the outage later on Saturday.

These water stations would continue to operate from 9am to 6pm into Wednesday when Thames Water said: "All our customers should now have some mains water supply, but it may be at a lower pressure than normal.

"This may be particularly obvious during peak demand in the morning and the evening. The situation is now improving rapidly but it will take a few more days before water supplies fully return to normal."

Thames Water has outlined that the outage was caused by leaks and airlocks in the network after the cold weather.

A spokesperson added: "We have over nine tankers supplying water in the area helping to meet demand and improve water pressure.

"We also have over 50 engineers in the area fixing leaks and removing airlocks from our network.

"Teams have also repaired more than 10 bursts in large water mains. These leaks are a result of the cold weather last week."

Water pressure is expected to improve in the coming days as Thames Water carry out repairs and as reservoir levels increase.

A technical issue at Pangbourne Water Treatment Works is also believed to have contributed to the water outage.

"We know how inconvenient it is if you lose your water supply and we’re working hard to get things back to normal as soon as we can," Thames Water added.