Sinkhole gulps car in High Wycombe
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This article is Trio years old
Monday three February two thousand fourteen 13.12 GMT Very first published on Monday three February two thousand fourteen 13.12 GMT
A family have spoken of their shock after a nine-metre-deep (30ft) sinkhole opened up in the driveway and gulped their car – and their ease that nobody was hurt.
Liz and Phil Conran’s teenage daughter discovered the Four.5-metre-wide crater at the family home in Walter’s Ash, near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, early on Sunday morning.
Conran said her daughter, Zoe Smith, Nineteen, went into hysterics upon discovering her prized Volkswagen Lupo had disappeared into the ground.
She said: “My daughter went to go and let her horses out because she was going off somewhere for the day and she had to drive up there, and she got herself all ready, got to the door, and witnessed her car wasn’t there.
“She thought that was a bit weird, of course it was still fairly dark outside, so she went round to the kitchen window and then she spotted the crater and just began screaming.
“We just kind of took it from there indeed. We had no idea whether the car was actually in the slot or not, we couldn’t get close enough to have a look right down to the bottom, it’s about thirty feet deep.
“The car is on its side, its utter of soil and she certainly, we don’t think, would have got out of it had she been in it, had she driven in and it had happened.”
A view of the sinkhole on the driveway of the Conrans’ home in High Wycombe. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA
Conran, a 51-year-old school bursar, said the ease that nothing had happened to her daughter was the staggering emotion, while the rest was “just an annoyance”.
“What could have happened to Zoe is so awful that we just feel so fortunate that we’re all OK, that actually we’ve not indeed had much chance to worry about who’s going to pay for it and what’s going to have to be done,” she said.
However, her daughter, a sales assistant, was “absolutely gutted” because she had been so proud of her car, Conran said.
She said the family, including her spouse Phil, 59, who works as an environmental consultant, were stunned at the size of the crater that had appeared in the driveway of the home where they have lived for the past nine and a half years.
“The actual size of it is what I think has taken us most by surprise,” she said. “It’s just gulped the car entire. The car has managed to rotate and turn, it’s on its side but its also facing the opposite way from where it was parked.
“So just the sheer size of it, and obviously what could have happened, and of course we’re wondering what else is going on in the area.”
She went on: “It’s one of those natural things that has happened, very likely been made worse by the fact that they’ve mined in the area in the past but whether or not that’s got anything to do with it we don’t know.”
The family stayed with neighbours on Sunday night after being advised to stay away from the house and are waiting for an insurance company representative to assess whether they can comeback.
When the crevice very first appeared, which Mrs Conran said think might may have happened at around 6.15am, the family did not know what to do because nobody had been hurt. But because they suspected the car was down the fuckhole they rang the police.
“They said: ‘Oh we don’t think there’s anything we can do, it’s going to be a building insurance job and a car insurance job’, so we got off the phone from them and thought: ‘Oh yeah, you know they’re most likely right, there’s not much they can do.’ But they obviously switched their mind because fairly quickly we had two panda cars and a fire engine parking up outside and cordoning it all off.
“Once they determined that there indeed wasn’t anything they could do, they weren’t going to be able to get the car out or anything, I think people were just coming to have a look because they just couldn’t believe that this had happened.”