New Cut Council set to investigate latest slippage
COUNCIL engineers are planning to carry out further checks on a new section of the embankment wall of the River Avon in the centre of Bristol after a section of it collapsed over the weekend.
A sizeable area of brickwork on the New Cut embankment, on the north side of the river close to Gaol Ferry Bridge, slipped towards the tidal river.
Council surveyors have made initial assessments of the situation this week, and are set to return for a closer look, but a council spokesperson said there was no immediately serious issue.
The slippage is on the same side of the river as the major collapse of the New Cut, which happened over a number of years from 2017 until 2019.
Then, in February last year, the entire Chocolate Path cycleway and harbour railway line collapsed into the river at the western end of Spike
Island, taking some of Cumberland Road with it too.
The road has now been closed or restricted for almost a year, and a major reconstruction programme is currently underway there, with an end date of the summer of 2022 now projected.
Council chiefs were criticised in January 2020 following the final major collapse of the New Cut embankment wall at that location, for not dealing with earlier slippages sooner, and taking almost a year to arrange for work to be done – only to find much more of the embankment then slipped into the river.
The New Cut was dug more than 200 years ago in the first decade of the 1800s as a bypass for the River Avon to create the Floating Harbour, with the western Chocolate Path and railway line added around 100 years later.
The Post understands the entire northern embankment will eventually need replacing or restoring.