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after eight months sudden appearance of sinkhole In Godstone, residents are facing more disruption.
Despite the 20 meter crater now being filled, Surrey County Council There are plans to drill holes in the High Street – where residents were evacuated in February – before the road is fully reopened.
after a Investigation Confirmed that there was a network of Victorian sand-mining tunnels Stabilization work now needs to be carried out, 10 meters below the surface, to prevent the problem from recurring.
Local authorities are also awaiting results of testing of the water main line to determine whether an unstable tunnel caused the pipe to break or a leaking main line caused the tunnel collapse.
30 homes were evacuated after at least one garden was engulfed by a sinkhole. While most residents returned to their homes by the end of March, the last homeowner could move back only in late September.
Local people told many times He felt work was “not treated as a priority” while he waited for his life in Godstone to return to normal.
Brain Davis, 88, said he has spent months watching repairs take place after he refused to leave his home during the incident, which left him without water for 10 days.
Hare and Hounds pub owner Mark Cullinan told the publication he had lost £50,000 since the pub collapsed in February.
“We’re down 40 percent from where we were last year,” he said. ,[The authorities] They really don’t care what they are affecting and no one has taken responsibility for it. This is absolutely ridiculous.”
A Surrey County Council spokesperson said: “This work has been planned for some time to determine the extent of the mine and carry out stabilization work on the ground below.”
The council is prepared to drill holes to determine the extent of the mine and carry out stabilization work, which may include the use of aerated concrete as fill.
It had previously said the road was not expected to reopen until at least December due to major work required.
Lloyd Allan, the council’s infrastructure manager who oversees repairs, told the BBC in August that the hole may have been caused by this. a burst water main,
“We don’t know what caused the water main to burst,” Mr Allen said. “So we started our own investigation, talking to people who lived in the area who knew about the mines. It took a few months using many different techniques to find them.”
He said the first thing engineers at the scene realized after the hole was discovered was that water was disappearing underground – an unusually large amount of water naturally seeps into the sand.
Engineers are plotting the tunnels by driving boreholes in the sandstone, a process made more complicated by underground cables and pipes, he said.
Mr Allen said: “We have to make sure it doesn’t go down again when we’ve finished. Because it’s a busy road, normally, big lorries come this way.”
Residents said they had known about the network of Victorian sand-mining tunnels for decades.