Whitchurch canal collapse: Major incident stood down as canal trust CEO warns repairs will take 'months, not weeks'

Emergency services were scrambled to the Llangollen Canal at around 4am on Monday (December 22) to reports of a hole emerging along the waterway, causing large volumes of water to escape onto land in the Chemistry area of Whitchurch.

Soon after, a major incident was declared, and boaters were evacuated, while work was underway to dam the canal and stop the flow of water.

It was later estimated that around 100 million gallons of water had escaped the canal and poured into neighbouring fields.

On Tuesday morning, the chief executive of the Canal & River Trust, Campbell Robb, said the major incident has now been stood down and that all the evacuated boaters had secured accommodation.

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, Mr Robb said: "This is an unusually large breach, these are 250-year-old canals, and there are 2,000 miles of them.

"It doesn't happen very often, so we need to get in there, work out how to make it safe, how to get the boats out, and how to make the rest of the canal safe as well. That's what we're doing today.

"Then, we'll start to find out what happened. We'll learn lots of lessons from what happened yesterday." 

Mr Robb said that over the next few months the trust would be working to rebuild the entire embankment, which had collapsed on both sides of the canal.

He said: "The next job is to get this fixed, and it's what we're going to be doing over the next few months.

"This will involve the rebuilding of the whole embankment, making sure we put it back together in a really safe and secure way.

"It'll be a few months at least, probably be longer - it'll be months, not weeks."