A Ramsbottom mum says she’s “living in terror” after an excavation pit dug by developers across the road from her house was abandoned — and has been slowly crumbling ever since.
Bethanie Bailey, 35, lives on Carr Street with her five-month-old baby. She says the pit — which sits between Carr Street and Tanners Street — has been getting wider every day, and she’s genuinely scared about the risk of a landslip.
“What goes through my head is ‘I don’t want to be buried in my house’,” she told BBC Radio Manchester. “I don’t want to be lying in bed for a tree to fall across the roof. It’s really scary.”
The work was part of an approved plan to build a single dwelling with a garage on the site. Trucks arrived last year to excavate the steep bank, but a Health and Safety Executive inspector ordered work to stop in October until the slopes could be proven stable enough for workers. The developer, Blakeman Design and Build, went into liquidation in 2024.
Since then, the site has just sat there. Bethanie says she had no idea what was going on for a long time — and that’s part of what makes it so unsettling.
She’s now started a petition alongside other local residents calling on the council to stabilise the bank and recover costs from the developer. It’s passed 785 signatures.
“At the end of the day, all that I want is it to be made safe. I don’t care what it looks like.”
Bury Council’s building control officers have visited the site and say the excavation doesn’t pose an immediate risk to the public, with “no evidence” that nearby buildings face any immediate risk of damage. The council says the situation is “complex”, involves multiple parties, and it’s doing “all it can” to help reach a resolution.
There’s also apparently a legal dispute running in the background over a combined drain that was severed during the works, causing water to spill out onto the site. United Utilities has tested the water and confirmed it’s “clean, untreated water” that isn’t coming from their network, and says it will continue supporting investigations by other agencies.
Bury Council says it’s “continuing to investigate and monitor the situation” and that the civil issues between several parties “require mutual resolution”.
It’s a grim situation — a liquidated developer, a stalled legal dispute, and a young mum left watching a hole in the ground get bigger from her window. Nobody’s saying the risk is immediate, but “no immediate risk” is a long way from “sorted”.
Full story via BBC News, reported by Ewan Gawne.
If you’re local and have more context on this — or you’ve signed the petition — feel free to share what you know in the comments.
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