Firm that caused chaos when pipe burst goes bust
A CONSTRUCTION company which caused calamitous flooding in a Nottinghamshire suburb has gone into liquidation, with all staff made redundant.
Homes off High Road in Chilwell, particularly on Gwenbrook Avenue, were flooded on March 7 last year after builders who were converting the nearby former Nottingham College campus into student accommodation struck a Severn Trent water pipe.
Residents were evacuated and roads were turned into fast-flowing streams, with locals crafting makeshift barriers out of bins, tiles and bags of soil. Some homeowners, who had to throw out many of their belongings and gut their damp properties, have still not been able to return nearly a year later.
Eventually the building’s owner, property developer ALB, apologised over the chaos caused by the mistake but said only its Ilkestonbased contractor HBW Construction had been on-site.
Now it has surfaced that the contractors who had hit the large pipe, which pumped out an estimated 1.2 million litres of water a minute, have gone into liquidation.
Adam Price, of CMB Partners, was appointed as joint liquidator of HBW Construction Limited on January 15, 2024. The liquidator explained the company’s failure seemed “significantly linked” to the damage inflicted in March 2023.
HBW Construction had suffered a significant loss on the associated contract as a result of this incident, which had a significant knock-on financial impact, CMB Partners explained. The statement of affairs, prepared by CMB Partners, shows Severn Trent Water is owed £31,569.
The Post contacted Severn Trent for more details, but it could not provide any further information.
HBW Construction’s liquidators said it had also suffered, as many other construction companies have, with cost rises resulting in low profitability on contracts.
All employees were made redundant prior to the company entering liquidation, with the most recent Companies House filings for the firm suggesting it had 29 workers as of late 2022. The conversion of the old college was completed in the months after the flooding incident, with the 162-bed Graduation House opening in time for the 2023/24 academic year.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the national regulator for workplace health and safety, had been investigating whether any regulations had been breached at the construction site.
After months of examining the incident and making inquiries, in January HSE investigators confirmed they would not be taking any action.