Royals Sands Development, Pleasurama Cliff, a lump falls off

Over the weekend a lump of the cliff façade fell off. What is important to stress here is that last week the council assured the HSE that this façade was safe enough for people to work underneath and safe enough to build a residential development next to it.

During the weekend the part of the façade that will be above the main entrance to the new development shed enough masonry to kill a person standing below.
The missing bit that that it where it fell from is in the picture above, you can also see the bit next to it is lose.


You can see from the picture above (a detail from one of the pictures in Saturdays post) that it was there last week.



First I phoned the Health and Safety Executive and spoke to the chap I spoke to last week, I wasn’t really sure what action they intend to take, he said he would talk to his supervisor.

He suggested that I phoned the council’s building control department, unfortunately the building control officers were either in meetings or out on site.

Here is the bigger picture of now

and here the bigger picture of last week.

It was becoming obvious that I wasn’t getting very far and that my next port of call would have to be the fire brigade.

The problem here though is the blocked drain, featured in the previous post, the question being is the whole structure full of water and likely to collapse

as I said before part of this structure collapsed in the 60s and so the potential hazard may be much more than it first seems.

See http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts11/id14.htm


If it isn’t dangerous then it will be a bit embarrassing for me but if it is it could be fatal to the firemen or anyone else who messes about with it.

Anyway I stressed the importance of the drain to the fire officers and they went off to look at it.

Finally the council’s building control engineer phoned up, we then had a fairly heated discussion about the whole structure.

I pointed out that I had asked him a year ago to put up signs preventing heavy vehicles from driving on the footpath at the top of the cliff.

That the cliff needs a proper survey.

That a bit of cliff that bits periodically drop of isn’t suitable to have a building with over 1,000 people in it 4 metres away from it.

At least he has agreed to put some fencing at the bottom to stop people going where the bits are falling and to get a cherry picker and have a look at the cliff.