South West Water has said it hopes to restore water to all properties in Cornwall by tomorrow despite a fallen tree ripping a major water pipe out of the ground at a major treatment works.
The firm experienced significant damage to a water treatment works in Helston as a result of Storm Goretti on Thursday evening.
The service have confirmed that two drinking water mains next to the Wendron site suffered major damage after a tree ripped the pipe out of the ground and snapped it in two.
The damage to the eight inch mains meant that it simply would not be able to supply water, meaning the company had to take action using and overland pipe.
Director of water services for Devon and Cornwall at SWW Sam Bottomley said they've isolated the damage to the mains pipe and used an overland pipe to connect the watermain, highlighting that it's a slower process to get water to its customers.
Despite this, the company have said they are working towards reinstating all homes with water by tomorrow.
SWW said from the initial 11,000 properties without water, that number has significantly decreased to 3,000.
It stressed that this is a 'best case scenario' situation given they are continuing to work during power outages, challenging weather and pipe damage as a result of the storm.
Sam added: "All of our treatment works were affected by the power cut, but Wendron Water Works in particular was affected by the power cut. Next to that treatment works are two drinking water mains which supply customers in the area with drinking water.
"They're big eight-inch mains, one of them has been completely ripped out of the ground and snapped in half by a tree.
"What we've done is we've isolated that and we've used an overland pipe to connect the watermain and we're relying on the other major main that we have, so we are still able to supply customers with water.
"It does slow things down as we don't have the same volume of water going through.
""We had 11,000 originally out of water, we now believe that to be around 3,000 so we're making good progress and we hope as a best case scenario to have everybody connected by tomorrow.
"However, we are still dealing with power outages, challenging weather and damage caused to pipes by the storm.
"That is the best case scenario and that's what we're working towards, however, we are working in challenging weather conditions with multiple pipes damaged by the storm and continued power outages."
See photos of the damage below