Gatwick Airport is back to normal after a water supply failure left both terminals without running water for the best part of a day, right in the middle of one of the busiest weekends of the summer holiday season.
The trouble started on Sunday 26 July after a power failure at SES Water’s Bough Beech Water Treatment Works, which supplies the airport along with parts of Kent and Sussex. With no running water, toilets across both the North and South terminals had to close, restaurants and cafés were forced to shut, and staff handed out bottled water to stranded passengers for hours while engineers worked to fix the problem.
Despite the disruption, Gatwick confirmed that every scheduled flight on the Sunday still departed as planned, though some services were delayed. By Monday morning, water had returned to the “vast majority” of the airport campus, and the first departures of the day — an easyJet flight to Athens from the North Terminal and a Wizz Air flight to Podgorica from the South — both left on schedule.
It’s a reminder of just how much modern airport operations depend on infrastructure well outside their own control. Gatwick handles tens of millions of passengers a year as Britain’s second-busiest airport, and a single treatment works fault miles away was enough to shut down toilets and food outlets across the entire site. For taxi and PHV drivers working the Gatwick run, it’s worth knowing this kind of disruption can also mean longer waits and frustrated passengers at pick-up points, even when flights themselves aren’t affected.
For airport transfers in the South East, DM Airport Transfers covers routes to and from Gatwick and the surrounding region.
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