AFTER a recent flash flood, Sainsbury’s faced another crisis on Saturday, when a fire forced a two-hour closure of the store in Midhurst Road, on what its duty manager called ‘the busiest day since Christmas.’

Sam Udy told The Herald: “At around 12.30pm a small fire broke out in the processing room at the back of the store, where one of the air conditioning units had sprung a leak, which resulted in water dripping onto a light fitting, causing it to blow up.

“This immediately set off both the fire and panic alarms and after calling the fire brigade, we rapidly had to evacuate all customers and staff.

‘We managed to do this in under two minutes, but there were a lot of disgruntled people, who had to abandon their trolleys and leave empty handed.

“It was the busiest time of the day, as customers were shopping for food and drinks before the England vs Sweden match, which started at 3pm.”

Liphook firefighters arrived immediately as they were taking part in the Carnvial Fun Day at the nearby Church Centre, but for safety reasons the store could not re-open until two hours later, when customers had finished their shopping by going to the Co-op in Headley Road instead.

Another crisis hit residents in Bramshott and Liphook on Sunday, when South East Water switched off water supplies for two hours during the early evening.

An SEW spokesman said: “While our reservoirs and underground water sources are at the level we’d expect for this time of year, we’ve seen a huge rise in the demand for water during this heatwave, especially at breakfast and dinner time, causing low water pressure for some customers.

“To keep up with demand, we’ve been pumping an extra 100 million litres of water per day through our 9,000 miles of pipes – enough to flush 1.25 million toilets. We have increased our leakage detection team by a third and have engineers working around the clock to support our efforts.

“We are also trying to resolve the issue in this area by bringing in water from other parts of our network.

“This did improve the situation until Sunday evening when we saw unprecedented demands for water with increases of more than 30 per cent which may be due to people watering their garden.”

“We are very sorry some of our customers may have experienced low pressure or no water but we would like to reassure them that we were working very hard to restore normal water flow to the area.”