A boater whose craft was left teetering on the brink of a 160ft hole on a canal told how he went back on board to rescue his two cats – as a subsidence expert warned other sections of the centuries-old network could also be at risk.
Paul Stowe has been left homeless for Christmas after his narrowboat, named Pacemaker, was left dangling above the cavity which swallowed two other narrowboats.
The narrowboats were lost after the bed of the Llangollen Canal collapsed early yesterday and an embankment failed, causing water to flood an adjacent field and prompting the emergency services to declare a major incident.
Mr Stowe escaped barefoot with his wife and son with just the clothes on their backs after they woke to the sound of rushing water like ‘Niagara Falls’ – but bravely crept back on board after his son reminded him about their two cats.
‘I went back onboard and managed to get them’, he said. ‘It was pitch black, freezing and scary because we did not know what had happened.’
Incredibly, nobody was injured in the 4.20am incident.
Bob Wood, 75, whose houseboat was the first one to plunge into the huge hole, woke up to use the toilet and realised his home was listing.
He was able to flee from the stricken craft before it plunged down the hole, then alerted Mr Stowe and the occupants of a third boat, before that craft was sucked into the hole ‘stern first’.
Paul Stowe has told of rushing back to his narrowboat to save his cats after it started falling into a sinkhole
Aerial images show the point where the water came bursting out of the canal, trapping two boats in the sinkhole
Pacemaker can be seen teetering perilously close to the edge of the sinkhole
As Mr Stoke spoke from the scene of the near disaster at Whitchurch, Shropshire, this afternoon subsidence specialist Freya Chapman told the Daily Mail how the incident may have been caused by an undetected water leak over a prolonged period of time, something she said would have been akin to a ‘ticking timebomb’.
And she warned that other sections of the canal network could also now be at risk of a similar fate.
Ms Chapman, Residential Lead at specialist ground engineering contractor Mainmark UK, said: ‘For this age of canal it would have been a puddly clay lining on the canal bed.
‘Over time, localised defects could occur and even a small defect – over a prolonged period of time – could create an outwards flow, washing away the finer materials, such as sands and gravels over silty clays, beneath the canal bed and weakening all of the infrastructure.’
Ms Chapman added: ‘I think other sections of canal could also be at risk. It is an old network and it needs a lot of maintenance. It all comes down to money.
‘We are in unchartered territory. We had a summer where there was very little rainfall for 18 weeks so the ground would have dried out. Then we have had sudden periods of heavy rain and because the ground is dry that has weakened it further.’
She said potential degradation of the puddle clay lining, any localised defects, or even historic repairs could have contributed to any leakage.
Speaking from the scene, Julie Sharman, chief operating officer at the Canal & River Trust (CRT), said efforts to establish the cause of the incident were continuing.
The sinkhole caused large volumes of water to escape onto land in the Chemistry area of Whitchurch
Three boats were caught up in a section of the canal which completely drained with water
But she added that at this stage, it didn’t appear to be connected to a leak, a failed culvert or overtopping, the causes of similar incidents in the past.
Earlier this year, the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) warned about the risk to life that can come from a lack of maintenance of canals.
The charity told The House parliamentary magazine: ‘It is not an overstatement to marvel that so far there has been no loss of life – ageing infrastructure is expensive to maintain without anything going wrong, and that’s the point: investment now will save money in the near and distant future.’
The charity continued: ‘When adding up the costs, we should be thankful that those costs for the moment don’t include loss of life’.
And last year, a regional director at the CRT, the charity responsible for the lion’s share of inland waterways in the UK, warned the country’s 250-year-old canal infrastructure was ‘creaking at the seams’.
Sean McGinley, the CRT’s director for Yorkshire and the North East, said waterways could ‘disappear’ if more funding was not made available to repair them.
The CRT has said the stretch of water where the breach occurred was inspected as recently as last month, while a major, or ‘principle’ inspection took place in the spring.
But Ms Sharman said the stretch of water where Monday’s breach occurred was not thought to be at risk.
Paul Stowe’s boat remains on the edge of the sinkhole while two others are trapped in the hole
‘There are some parts of the network that are more vulnerable than others’, she said. ‘But we weren’t concerned about leakage at this site.’
She said that upstream of the breach position, there is an 18 mile stretch of the canal without locks, with the next locks a mile after the breach point.
‘Once the failure commenced, that won’t have helped matters because there would have been more water running for longer, as it couldn’t be held at locks’, she said.
‘The water was running and boaters reported hearing rushing water. A lot of material was moved by the force of that water as it rubs against the ground. As it runs out of the side (of the embankment) it starts to take the ground with it, making the hole bigger.’
She told the Mail that the clean-up and rebuilding operation would probably take months, and would involve the construction of a road to the site in order to bring in a crane to remove the two narrowboats from the hole.
But Ms Chapman queried how the inspections were conducted and said any failures would have been ‘difficult to see with the naked eye’.
She added: ‘This could happen again, given the age of the network.
‘This is the fourth breach incident this year on our canals, and with hotter summers and wetter and colder winters potentially exacerbating the problem I think we are on the brink of a situation where this happens more often.’
A sinkhole, 50 metres by 50 metres in size opened up in a canal in Shropshire
The boat can be seen tipping over the sinkhole’s edge, with the sound of wood creaking and shattering as it is swallowed up
Youtuber and narrowboat owner Paul Smith-Storey captured the moment a boat was dragged towards the sinkhole
Charlie Norman, Director of Campaigns at the IWA, said: ‘The year began with a major canal breach in the North West and it’s ending the same way with yet another dramatic incident on our waterways, and without decisive action these breaches will keep repeating.
‘Maintenance alone isn’t enough: this canal in Shropshire is a vital piece of national water infrastructure. Every single added failure shuts down the connected system, it disrupts water supplies to reservoirs and really has a negative impact on local economies, many of those affected are small businesses just trying to get by. In some cases people are even left homeless.
‘IWA issued a strong warning earlier this year about the vulnerability of the waterways network, from floods to droughts to under-funding, and this year has shown those risks are growing.
‘Repairs must be a priority, but government should have a recovery investment pot ready so the network can reopen safely and quickly and businesses don’t pay the price.’
In March 2018, a 230ft stretch of the waterway in Middlewich, Cheshire, was washed away after the canal overflowed – leaving a 40ft deep hole.
The CRT said the paddle gates on two locks had been left open by a member of the public, causing the canal to overflow and resulting in a section of the 200-year-old embankment being washed away.
The Whitchurch breach came almost a year after an elevated embankment on the Bridgewater Canal at Little Bollington, near Lymm in Cheshire, collapsed on New Year’s Day 2025 following days of heavy rain. An embankment on a stretch carrying the canal 40ft (12) above the River Bollin failed, resulting in water pouring into neighbouring fields and flooding a sewage works.
Less widely reported, on the same day, rain also led to a structural failure of an embankment on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal between Mossley and Stalybridge. Following the rainfall event, the canal overtopped the lock and washed away the embankment to the River Tame below.
Almost three months later, a breach of the Macclesfield Canal near Bosley occurred due to a leak in the canal bed. CRT staff worked into the night help move around 15 boats away from the breach and installed stop planks to prevent any further loss of water.
The 46-mile Llangollen Canal is one of the most popular holiday inland waterways famed for its 1007ft long Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, a World Heritage site which towers above the Dee Valley.
A spokesman for the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs said: ‘Our canals and rivers provide a wide range of benefits, such as connecting people to nature.
‘That is why we are investing more than £480 million of grant funding to the Canal and River Trust to support the essential infrastructure maintenance of our much-valued waterways.’
