Qualifying a leak over the phone.

The caller is not describing a leak

They are describing water where it should not be. The words they use — burst, flood, overflow, seepage — carry no technical meaning and vary from one street to the next. Taking the description at face value sends the wrong crew; asking them to diagnose annoys them. The way through is a short fixed set of questions about what they can actually see.

Four questions, always the same

• Where exactly is the water? Pavement, roadway, garden, meter box, inside the property. This alone often decides whose responsibility it is.
• How much, and since when? Damp patch, steady trickle, running water. A patch that has been there for weeks is not the same job as a flow that started this morning.
• Clear or dirty? Clear suggests the supply side. Dirty or smelling suggests the sewer, which is a different team and sometimes a different operator.
• Is anything at risk? Traffic, a basement, an electrical box, a loss of supply to the neighbours. This sets the priority, and it is the only question whose answer can override all the others.

What the answers change

Clear water, flowing, on the public side, with supply affected: the network crew goes now. The same water inside the property after the meter is the customer’s own pipework — and saying so politely on the first call saves a visit that would have concluded the same thing three days later. Dirty water is never a supply job until proven otherwise.

Two traps

The first is inheriting the caller’s vocabulary into the record, so that the work order says « burst » and the crew arrives equipped for something that turns out to be a weeping joint. The second is stopping the questions as soon as the case sounds familiar. The fourth question is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that sets the priority.

Why the same four, every time

Free text cannot be counted. Four fields can. Ask them identically and within a season you know which streets produce the most calls, how many visits found nothing, and how often the same address calls twice — which is the clearest sign that the first visit did not resolve anything.