A Moray school was forced to send children home at lunchtime on Wednesday after their water supply was cut off without warning.
Teachers at Logie Primary in Dunphail called a halt to lessons when they realised that there was no water emerging from taps, prompting a spokeswoman for the school to comment “you can’t run a school without running water”.
Scottish Water later confirmed that a planned power cut at their local pumping station was the cause of the problem – and blamed “communication problems” as the reason why no backup supply was put in place or warning issued to the public.
“We had no choice but to send the children home,” the school spokeswoman said, adding: “We don’t know how it happened but later in the afternoon the water was back on and working again – so we are confident the children will be able to return to lessons for the rest of the week.”
A spokeswoman for Scottish Water apologised to customers affected by the outage that lasted around four hours, saying: “We received notification of the planned outage – however, this information failed to reach the appropriate team.
“As soon as we began to receive calls reporting the lack of water we dispatched a generator and operator to the Forres site.
“We will be making every effort to review the notification process we have in place to help ensure this type of incident does not happen in future.”