'Uncertainty' for traders after sinkhole damage

A beautician has had to cancel more than 50 appointments after being evacuated from her workplace due to a sinkhole in the La Pouquelaye area of St Helier, Jersey.

Penny Downes, a skin therapist at Dynamic Health on Clarendon Road, was one of those evacuated on Wednesday.

A burst water main on Rouge Bouillon - which Jersey Water said it repaired on Wednesday afternoon - created a sinkhole beneath the road.

The government said on Wednesday authorities remained "concerned" about the affected building and damage to the road.

Ms Downes said: "Not ideal for the busiest week of the year for the skincare and beauty industry, but we're grateful to be safe, all of the agencies that helped us yesterday were magnificent."

She said she and others arriving at Dynamic Health in the morning had noticed some "internal structural damage", including about 15 cracks in the building.

Katie Toates, owner of Dynamic Health, said the last day had been "a huge stress".

She said: "This is an old building, we do have a few little cracks from time to time, but I've never seen anything like this - the engineer when he first came out said this is the sort of cracking he would expect in a building that has been neglected for 20 years.

"This is stuff that has happened in less than 24 hours, so it has been quite difficult to get our heads around."

Ms Downes said: "At that point we hadn't gone down to the basement, so we didn't know we'd got a problem underneath the building, and I wasn't even aware that the water main had gone either in the Rouge Bouillon Le Pouquelaye area."

She said things "started to unravel" when they realised the basement had started flooding.

"There was obviously devastation outside the clinic as well, so we put two and two together, made four, and started to be evacuated."

Ms Downes said Jersey Water had been "particularly amazing".

The utility firm apologised on Wednesday, adding staff were assessing damage to a building in the area to "understand the cause" of the sinkhole.

The Government of Jersey said Clarendon Road was now open southbound towards town, and said diversions remained in place around the road closure.

It added Infrastructure and Environment was assessing repairs to the hole - and said further updates would follow on Friday after 13:00 GMT.

Ms Downes said although she and the other business owners at Dynamic Health were "in an uncertain moment", they were all "very, very hopeful" they could reopen their doors soon.

Martin Skyba, manager at Jersey Water, said it had excavated the area and found where the burst had come when works began.

He said: "We repaired that really quickly, so took about an hour or so to get repaired, but during that repair we noticed some damage to the property opposite so we quickly contacted the property owner, made them aware of it and made them understand that they needed to evacuate the building.

"Our focus now is to make sure that we can get it fixed and get the road reinstated and opened as quickly as possible."

Mr Skyba said further repairs would need to be done to the road once the property was safe and that the company did not know when the road would reopen to the public.

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