Elderly and disabled residents in a town centre block of flats spent two days without running water when a pumping mechanism seized.

Water at Broadway Heights, containing 58 flats let to the social housing tenants of Golding Homes and Orbit Housing Association, ran dry at 4pm on Sunday.

Clive Watson, a tenant of the homes next to Maidstone West rail station, said: “We called Golding Homes immediately and an engineer arrived around 6pm, but he couldn’t fix the problem.

“There are elderly people here, and disabled people. But we had no water for a bath, or cup of tea, or to flush the toilets,until Golding gave us 12 bottles of water each the next day.”

Golding Homes spokesman Lisa Yates said a specialist engineer had been to the flats on Monday to assess the situation and replacement parts were ordered.

“We were able to reinstate the supply around 1pm on Tuesday,” she said.

“Depending on the recommendation of the engineer, we will seek to carry out longer term works if required.”

Miss Yates insisted the housing association had staff on hand to provide tenants with all the water they needed during the outage.

She said each tenant had been given a 20-litre water container and 12 one-litre bottles of water.