Dionne Duncan pictured outside the front door of her flat before the pipe burst

A WOMAN has described the nightmare of living for a year in a flat wrecked by a burst Thames Water pipe­.

Dionne Duncan accused the water company of treating her with contempt after they failed to fix her flooded Barnsbury flat properly and are still haggling with her over cost.

Her home in Offord Road has been flooded twice after two eruptions from the broken pipe – the a second one earlier this year happened while she was waiting on a financial resolution for the first.

The IT programmes manager has had no heating in her open-plan living room and kitchen for more than a year after her tiling and underfloor heating was broken by contractors.

“I cry every morning,” she said. “I don’t sleep. I feel like I’m being massively punished. I feel like before this, I was a very logical, practical, fair- minded person – but they’re not meeting me halfway. And it’s breaking me.”

Flooding after the pipe burst

She added: “I can’t give in but I’ve got nothing else to fight with.”

Thames Water wrote to local councillors in the area promising to “look into” the issue after neighbours living in Ms Duncan’s road suffered three separate floods in four years, along with three months of digging to fix a broken sewer.

In 2021 the Tribune reported on the case of Alfie Sajir and his mother Tracy, who had seen their Offord Road home flooded twice and were still waiting for compensation.

Ms Duncan said: “I would like Thames Water to fix my house. I just need peace. Put me somewhere that is equal to the home that I bought and paid for and am still trying to pay for, until the job is done. And show me the plan to fix the road. I don’t want to live in fear and panic that this is going to happen again.”

She called on the utilities company to be nationalised.

Her comments come after Thames Water chief executive Sarah Bentley, admitted to a House of Lords Industry and Regulatory Committee last month that they have replaced just half a per cent of their oldest Victorian pipes, which are more than 150 years old.

It is believed the pipe under Offord Road is 170 years old, more than double the 80-year life expectancy given for London pipes.

Devastation in the basement

When the utility was privatised in 1989, Margaret Thatcher’s government justified the sell-off by promising it would release funds to tackle the replacement of the pipes.

But in a move described by London Mayor Sadiq Khan as “overdue,” it is only now that the water company is looking to carry out an overhaul of leak- prone cast-iron pipes by replacing them with plastic ones. Ms Bentley told the Lords Committee it would take up to 20 years to “spread the cost of replacing this Victorian infrastructure that so urgently needs replacing”.

She said that while they were “absolutely throwing resources at this,” all London pipes were beyond their use-by date and they were fixing a leak “every 10 minutes”.

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted – sitting on the committee – questioned whether “there should be some penalty on the water companies who have perhaps been negligent in the past to have not already have started to replace [pipes] at a greater rate” and accused them of failing to meet their public duty.

“It sounds a bit like cheating to me if you reduce the pressure to meet the [leaks] target rather than going out to repair the problem,” she added.

In a letter to Islington councillors last month, Thames Water said they were “looking into Offord Road bursts” and were “expecting to be replacing a substantial length of this main”.

A spokesperson for Thames Water declined the Tribune’s invitation to comment, saying they needed more time to respond to Ms Duncan’s concerns.