A WHOLE hillside is on the move poised above homes and a road – but experts say they have not yet worked out how to tackle it despite the anxieties of residents.
"Any wrong move could trigger a major slip," District Surveyor Rob Peacey said of the huge wall of mud starting to spill onto the Joy's Green-Ruardean road.
"It is the worst I have seen. But the technical difficulties and legal problems are stopping us doing anything at the moment."
He said the extremely heavy rains of the period leading up to the May break had added to a situation that was already difficult, lubricating the underlying rock so that the mud slid over it easily.
Experts
The county highways department had called on the experts who dealt with problems like sliding spoil tips in the Welsh coalfields, but they were unable to get heavy machinery onto the land yet for a proper survey.
Temporary traffic lights are in operation to ease traffic round a glacier-like river of liquid mud and in the sodden land above and behind it trees lean at wild angles, moving with the mud down the steep hillside.
"It has been going for 18 months now, and some more came down last week," said John Morgan, whose cottage home is just over the road from the landslip.
He believes the authorities should have acted earlier. "Nobody seems to want to take responsibility of it. It would have helped at the start to try to run some of the water off the back of it before it got like this.
Domino
"What they don't seem to realise is that there would be a domino effect if this goes – lots more will start sliding after it."
And neighbour Carol Harper, whose home is just across the
Vention Lane junction, is also worried by the slip, although she has been told that it is more likely to cross the junction and carry on down the lane rather than threaten her property.
Race
"It used to be such a peaceful spot too," she said. "Now we get traffic trying to race the three-way lights.
"There's the generator for the lights and over the last few days the electricity board has had to put my cottage and Mr Morgan's on a bigger generator because the power pole started to go."
It is understood that the land above the road, which has a history of instability, is part-owned by the Forestry Commission and part in private ownership.