Unsafe pavements can cost lives, says Vanessa Feltz
Councils need to handle this perennial issue before we mourn more victims, says Vanessa Feltz
We bang on about potholes all the time, but we never discuss the other perennial peril posing threat to life and limb. I’m talking about our hazardous and ill-maintained pavements.
On Friday at 6.04pm, I received this message from my son-in-law: “Vanessa, come urgently. I need you to stay with the children. Allegra is badly injured. We are waiting for the ambulance.” My lithe, fit daughter, in her mid-30s, was walking home from work, enjoying the brief spell of sunshine and looking forward to a weekend with her family.
She was wearing a pair of sensible trainers, and her phone was exactly where it should have been, safely zipped inside her briefcase. She tripped on an uneven pavement slab and as she hurtled forward, hit her face on another jagged shard of broken pavement. Her husband, summoned by kind passersby, found her unable to move, lying in a spreading pool of her own blood.
They arrived home from the hospital at just past midnight. My daughter looked like a broken bird. She had fractured her elbow in two places. A wide gash on her chin was cleaned and stitched up. She has a black eye, a cut on her eyebrow, lacerations and contusions on her knees and a nasty wound in the centre of one palm.
Six hours after the accident she was still shaking, her teeth chattering. My son-in-law had the presence of mind to take a picture of the cracked, potentially lethal, pavement. If the council is not flooded with calls from injured residents, it’s a miracle.
On LBC on Sunday, I asked listeners about simply navigating the UK’s neglected pavements and the switchboard ignited. We heard from a 30-year-old wheelchair user who was hurled from her chair, smashing her nose so badly the surgeon warned she must never leave the house unaccompanied again because the damage was so bad another break would be irreparable. We gasped as a woman, mourning the loss of her beloved mother, described a tumble on a pavement which caused a fatal brain injury.
A woman in her 40s on a walking holiday in Scotland phoned fresh from A&E. She’d fallen horribly over an unexpected crevice in a high street pavement. A blind gentleman described the difficulty decaying pavements pose to him and his invaluable guide dog. Is it too much in 2024 to implore our councils to protect us from unsafe pavements?
