The leafy village devastated by Asda petrol station leak

The first thing you notice is not the smell, but the sign. ‘Bramley Open for Business’ it tells drivers on the busy A-road approaching the picturesque village deep in the Surrey stockbroker belt.

That optimistic billboard gives no clue as to the way villagers’ lives have been blighted by a devastating fuel leak at the local petrol station.

The misery inflicted on Bramley, where the air is often thick with petrol fumes, serves as a parable of modern Britain.

It is a sadly all-too-familiar tale of warnings ignored, bureaucratic buck-passing and compensation delayed.

As three of the UK’s biggest companies fail to sort out the spillage, residents suffer. One, supermarket Asda, is in crisis after falling into private equity hands.

Another, Thames Water, is teetering on the brink of collapse after being gouged of billions in dividends by foreign owners.

A third, BT-owned Openreach, has attracted the ire of residents, as hundreds are left without broadband or phone lines.

On the door of an abandoned greengrocer is a letter from former owner Phil Cowey. He recently shut up shop and emigrated to New Zealand with his wife Abby and their children, Milo, 7, and Eliza, 4.

His business, Bramley’s Apples, had been struggling for a while. But the final straw came with the endless disruption and traffic jams that have wreaked havoc in Bramley since the leak was confirmed.

‘Every day that there are roadworks costs me a fair bit of money in terms of lost trade,’ says Cowey in his letter.

No longer able to afford staff, he upped his hours to 80 a week – to no avail. So in July, Cowey quit with a heavy heart, taking his family with him to the other side of the world to start a new life.

The Coweys are among the biggest casualties of a leak that left more than 600 households without tap water for five weeks this summer after Thames Water issued a ‘do not drink’ notice as supplies were contaminated with petrol.

It meant they could not use tap water for drinking, cooking or brushing teeth, but could for showers, baths and handwashing.

Schools were also affected, including fee-paying St Catherine’s, whose patron is Queen Camilla, and where water restrictions were only lifted days before the new term started this month.

The Asda petrol station recently reopened having being closed since February, when it was identified as the source of a long-standing leak that saw thousands of litres of petrol seep out of a fractured pipe into surrounding ground.

Residents had been complaining for years about toxic fumes and foul smells in roads near the forecourt and in the Jolly Farmer pub nearby, but no action was taken.

‘We were fobbed off,’ says local councillor Jane Austin.

Heavy rain caused the fuel to spread into the water system, phone and broadband ducts, and the local stream, where villagers found dead fish floating on top of an oily surface sheen.

‘You had to wear a mask and open all the windows and doors,’ recalls Chris Hardstone, landlord of the Jolly Farmer. ‘It got to the stage where we had to close all our accommodation down.’

Even after partially re-opening, Hardstone says the stench was so bad that contractors hired for the clean-up had to move out of his rooms, costing him £10,000.

‘It’s been a nightmare for everyone,’ adds Austin, who is also advisor for local MP and former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.

The leak was plugged in February but experts say there may be 2,000 of litres of petrol still in the ground and it could take another year or more to sort out the mess.

Villagers say insult has been added to injury by the lack of a joined-up response and paltry compensation offers.

‘The deep frustration now is we’re not being given details about how much petrol is in the ground, how much has escaped off the site and where it’s gone to,’ says Helen Melia, of the Bramley Residents Action Group. ‘We need a co-ordinated plan for how Bramley is going to be cleaned up.’

‘Everyone is back-covering,’ adds Austin. ‘Nobody puts anything in writing because they’re afraid of being sued. It’s this lack of people taking responsibility for their own piece of work.’

The petrol station is one of 132 sites Asda bought in 2022 from the Co-op for £600million. But experts say the cause of the leak goes back to 2016 when the petrol station was run by an independent operator.

Asda accepts that as the current owner it is liable for compensating households and local businesses affected by the leak. It has set up a business support scheme promising uncapped payouts if claims being assessed by loss adjuster Sedgwick are successful. However, no payment has yet been made.

The supermarket chain, which is owned by the private equity firm TDR Capital and which was – until this week – run by petrol forecourt tycoon Mohsin Issa, has also promised a £50,000 fund for community projects and local organisations.

Asda has hired environmental consultancy EPS to monitor the area and lead the clean-up operation. But an opening offer of a £25 voucher to villagers – to be used at its local petrol station – was dismissed as ‘derisory’ by Melia at the Bramley Resident Action Group.

Asda’s chairman, Stuart Rose, who it was revealed yesterday is taking over from Mohsin Issa, told a residents’ meeting in the village there would be ‘no quick fix’.

Thames Water has also come under fire for crediting customers only £30 after issuing the ‘do not drink’ notice. Melia says the company was ‘clearly aware’ in October 2023 that the main water pipes in Bramley had become contaminated but did not act soon enough.

In reply, Thames Water said that under its customer service guarantee no further compensation was due as the outage at the 621 properties was planned and water was still being supplied. Melia called that response ‘astonishing’.

New barrier pipes across Bramley had been laid and Thames Water had carried out ‘an extensive sampling programme’, a spokeswoman added.

Villagers’ anger has recently switched to Openreach, the BT-owned provider of the broadband infrastructure to Bramley.

Hundreds of people are still without internet or phone lines months after fuel seeped into Openreach’s ducts and cables. Openreach says it is still seeing ‘significant spikes’ in vapour levels and it could take ‘at least 12 months’ to make its underground network ‘fully safe’. A spokesperson added: ‘This is a complex, unprecedented incident.’

But Melia, who is still making tea with bottled water, warns: ‘What’s happened in Bramley could happen anywhere in the country where there’s a petrol station.’

It is now up to Rose to sort out the mess. As if he didn’t have enough on his plate.