Residents in Surrey face a year-long wait for repairs after a massive sinkhole swallowed sections of High Street.
The sinkhole, which appeared on the night of February 17, forced the evacuation of 30 properties, 24 of which remain uninhabitable. A second, potentially linked sinkhole emerged in a front garden the following afternoon.
At a Tandridge District Council meeting on Tuesday, frustrated residents voiced concerns over the lack of clear housing provisions, with some reporting being shuffled between temporary accommodations almost daily.
Diego Silva, 33, told the packed meeting at St Nicholas Youth Centre that his family had slept in three different locations in just the past four nights. The meeting highlighted the ongoing disruption and uncertainty facing displaced residents as the lengthy repair process looms.
Mr Silva said he, his wife, and their 17-month old child are currently “crammed” inside the home of a friend who has three other children.
The banker, who has lived in Godstone for less than six months, told attendees: “If it was for us – me and my wife – we would be more than welcome to jump around, but we have a baby, and she needs the stability.
“We noticed that since we had to leave in the middle of the night, that affects the baby really badly, she has been really clingy, wants mummy and daddy all the time – she has been crying out in the middle of the night because she doesn’t know where she is.”
Some have found accommodation through insurance providers or personal connections.
However, one woman, who spoke on behalf of a number of residents, said insurers are offering only “two, four and six weeks” of accommodation and that the council would soon be receiving more requests for housing.
Two families have been so far been offered emergency temporary accommodation by the council, the meeting heard.
Initial emergency accommodation could be a Travelodge hotel or bed and breakfast rooms, the meeting was told.
The woman said these would be unsuitable given the latest timescales.
She said: “The families are bankrupting themselves eating whilst they’re in these Travelodges (and) they can’t wash their clothes”.
James Devonshire, head of housing at the council, said: “There’s no denying we would support anyone that needs it, there’s clearly a need to support longer-term now, obviously having heard the timelines.”
He said the council had expected that insurers would only offer a limited number of weeks.
The local authority can only house families with young children in hotel rooms for six weeks before they must move them on to self-contained units, he added.
The council currently supports 44 other households with emergency housing for different reasons, he said.
Lloyd Allen, who is in charge of the technical team that is responding to the incident, said “something like this takes up to a year to solve”.
The incident is considered a “collapse” rather than a sinkhole, he added.
The infrastructure team manager at Surrey County Council said: “We will work as hard as we can to get a solution in place – for those residents who have been displaced by this, it doesn’t mean that you won’t be there.
“We will try and make decisions to get people back into their homes as quickly as we can, but we need to have a knowledge over that – we can’t let people go back into their homes if we feel there’s a danger.
“We need to be really sure that there’s not a danger and we will be releasing people back into their homes gradually over a period of time, I don’t know what that period of time is”.
