‘I came home to find chasm’
A neighbour has spoken of his shock after returning from holiday to find a sinkhole outside his home.
The two-metre-wide void, on Upper Fant Road in Maidstone, first emerged on Tuesday and Kent County Council workers responded by making the area safe with emergency barriers. On Thursday, however, the road was partially closed between the entrances to St Michael’s Road and Whitmore Street for investigation work. It reopened on Monday, four days earlier than planned. Jesus Saez, 56, had only just returned from a trip to Spain when he discovered the chasm right outside his door.
“We didn’t expect to see that at all, it was a big shock,” he said. “I couldn’t get in with the car initially because the drive was all blocked.
“The water has also been dark and dirty and filled with debris at times.”
Bev Ainsworth, 55, who lives opposite, was the first to report the sinkhole. Speaking at the time of the discovery, she said: “We can get on and off the drive and can access the house without too much trouble, which is the most important thing. “The initial hole was quite big, if a bus was driving down the road, one of its wheels would definitely have been down it and that would have been it.
“For now it’s just a bit of an inconvenience and nothing more, but we pay a lot of council tax so hopefully they know what they’re doing.”
The hole, which was one metre deep, was the fifth sinkhole to have opened up within a twomile radius in the last 18 months. Last May a chasm swallowed up a car park at Bovis’s Orchard Fields development, near Fullingpits Avenue, the same month, the infamous tennis court sized sinkhole opened on Tonbridge Road. A void appeared in a driveway in Broomshaw Road a month earlier. Another turned up in Springwood Road in 2014. The exact cause of the epidemic is not known, but experts say underground clay banks and former mines could be contributing.