Clinton residents say they were left without water and in the dark following a double water outage in the town and surrounds which began on Friday afternoon.
The council issued an alert notifying a mains break at Clydevale Rd about 3pm Friday, via its website and community Antenno app.
A further break occurred at Roy Rd on Saturday, about 8am.
The two breaks meant the town’s reservoir dropped close to empty during Saturday and Sunday morning.
It began to refill once the breaks were repaired and was fully operational again yesterday.
In the meantime, many residents without domestic water tanks ran out of water without any idea of what was happening, Clinton community committee chairman Benji Perry said.
"Clinton has a lot of vulnerable older residents and people renting accommodation, many of whom do not have back-up water tanks.
"This is the third shutdown I can recall in the past couple of years, and the second over a weekend.
"Although the council put out an online alert on Friday, there’s been nothing since, and nothing to let people know the issue is resolved. That means most people have been more or less in the dark about the situation, which simply isn’t good enough."
Mr Perry said the committee had approached the council proposing a loan scheme to install domestic water tanks locally, which could be paid off via targeted rates for benefiting households.
"We’ve met a brick wall to date, although perhaps another outage might help get some movement."
Clinton Senior Citizens president Katrina Goodman said outages could be a major issue for older people, who would often simply "wear it".
"I’d say less than 50% of the town have water tanks, so you run out pretty quickly when there’s an outage.
"Add to that that older people often don’t use the internet, and the first they know is the tap stops working."
She said the outage had also led to the closure of the public toilets, which she oversaw.
"It’s just a bad look for the town."
A council spokeswoman said the council was aware many households did not have back-up supply, despite this being required as part of water scheme restrictions.
"All households are required to have a tank with at least two days’ storage [2000 litres], but council recommends 4000 litres, or larger if there’s space on the property."
She said a rates-linked domestic tank scheme could be investigated in the future, and comments regarding communications had been "noted".
