The number of complaints made by households about water companies to the industry watchdog has risen by a record 84% in a year, driven by customer concern and confusion over rising bills. The Consumer Council for Water (CCW) said the year-on-year increase was the highest in its 20-year history and showed just how dissatisfied many people were. Water customers in England and Wales have been hit with steep price hikes in recent years. The regulator Ofwat has also allowed firms to put up bills by 36% between 2025 and 2030 . Water UK, which represents firms, said it understood that higher bills was never welcome, but the money was needed to fund vital upgrades.

Image caption, Matthew Wright appeared at Bromley Magistrates' Court on Friday The former chief executive of Southern Water has appeared in court charged with conspiracy to defraud, over allegations water quality tests were manipulated to avoid penalties. Matthew Wright, 60, who denies any wrongdoing, appeared at Bromley Magistrates' Court on Friday alongside three other former employees. Wright, along with Philip Barker, 57, Clive Massey, 64, and Mark Gregory, 63, are accused of conspiracy to defraud the Environment Agency and water regulator Ofwat. It is alleged that between January 2012 and December 2017, the group manipulated a self-monitoring regime by carrying out artificial no-flow events at wastewater treatment works, to avoid failing environmental checks. The alleged conduct could have avoided fines of £45m or higher, according to the charges.

Water cyberattacks from Iran, China, and Russia target America's critical infrastructure. AI detection and anomaly detection tools could help defend aging water utility systems.

AI data centres are booming in Australia - but at what cost? The sheer size and noise of data centres are what people tend to notice first. Some say they sound like a jet plane about to take off, others complain of a high-pitched whine. When Lucy* puts her child to bed, she hears a constant humming. I'll hear it and think, 'What is that?

Israel has attacked a critical water desalination plant and a mosque in Gaza as it intensifies attacks on the enclave despite a'ceasefire'. Why'pogrom' best describes what's happening in the occupied West Bank Nathan Cofnas on whether he feels responsible for Jason Arday's death Are humanoid robots the future of warfare?

Water companies have been given the green light to increase bills for customers by an extra £3.4bn in coming years to meet increased pressures on infrastructure and the environment. Nearly a third of the extra funding provisionally approved for 13 water companies in England and Wales is earmarked for making sure water services are maintained. The rest will be used to meet rising demand from housebuilding and data centres and to address pollutants known as forever chemicals. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the proposal was real money out of family budgets at a time when they are struggling with the cost of living, and an environmental group described the decision as an insult. The regulator, Ofwat, said the extra spending would enable the firms to support growth and better environmental outcomes, and ensure important upgrades were not delayed.

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In a closed-door simulation, insurers played out their response to a mass disruption by China's Volt Typhoon hackers--and found a nightmare scenario. It's around an hour and 10 minutes into the role-playing game I've been invited to observe, a simulated catastrophic cyberattack on US water utilities, when the whole thing begins to feel less like a fun afternoon playing Dungeons & Dragons and more like a plausible threat to civilization. A full 24 hours of in-game time have passed since hackers disrupted 5,000 water utilities across the United States in this imagined scenario. Joshua Corman, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency strategist serving as our dungeon master, stands at the front of a conference space in an office tower high above Times Square, narrating the latest updates to the game's participants, a few dozen insurance executives set up in six teams. All of them have gone disturbingly silent. It's about to get harder," Corman says. "I'm going to share a few things, and it's going to hurt." It is, of course, still the same April afternoon as when we started--but in game time, the second-order effects of widespread water outages have started to become clear. Food refrigeration systems are failing at cold storage warehouses. Water-dependent drug and chemical manufacturing has been bottlenecked, leading to insulin shortages. Data centers' cooling systems are failing, causing outages of cloud services. Most critically, 2,000 hospitals are without water, hampering patient care and in some cases leading to evacuations as HVAC systems shut down and the July heat--the game takes place just before Independence Day in 2027--bakes facilities. Worse yet, Corman is playing a looping video onscreen, at the front of the room, showing a burst water main: The hackers have managed to trigger not just IT disruption but also, in at least some cases, real physical destruction that will take far longer to fix. "Everyone downstream is without water pressure," Corman says. "There are no breaks in real incident response," Corman explains just before the giant water pipe starts gushing onscreen. "If you have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom.

The Stream How does targeting water supply during war worsen the scarcity crisis? We explore why water infrastructure is increasingly being targeted in the midst of war and conflict. Water sustains life, but what happens when it is weaponised? In the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, desalination plants supplying millions in the Gulf have become targets. This reflects a growing pattern: water infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable as global scarcity intensifies.

Send the pool guy packing. One of these robotic buddies can maintain your water quality instead. Cleaning swimming pools is not fun. I learned this simple logic as a kid growing up in and around pools--it's the only way to survive summer in Houston, Texas. Four years ago, I became a pool owner myself, and I found that the rule still holds. Jumping into the pool on a hot day remains a rare treat, but if the pool is filled with leaves and dirt, that treat becomes a lot less delightful. And when the thermometer is reading over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the thought of laboring on the pool deck, scooping out debris with a net, is downright cruel.