Whitchurch canal repairs to take most of 2026

Repairing a canal collapse that caused boats to sink in a deep ditch due to spilled water could take most of 2026, officials said

New aerial images show the extent of damage caused to the Llangollen Canal and its embankment in Whitchurch, Shropshire, due to a breach on 22 December.

Two narrowboats remained at the bottom of a trench in the canal bed, with a third boat hanging over the edge. Dozens more boats ran aground.

The Canal and River Trust said some of the boats had been rescued, but repairing wider damage to the area would be “a massive project costing several million pounds”.

Julie Sharman, chief operating officer of the Canal and River Trust, said engineers were still investigating the cause of the “catastrophic” failure.

“Sometimes [the cause is] “It’s not certain,” he said.

“World structures are quite complex and there are some thoughts as to what might be causing this, but I would prefer not to speculate.

“When you get a waterway through a levee, it dissolves as you go, and then it becomes quite catastrophic, as we can see here, and the damage is significant.”

Two dams have been built to isolate the damaged section and most of the stranded boats have already been refloated.

Our focus now is on rescuing the two narrow boats at the bottom of the ditch.

“We’re trying to figure out the best way to do this,” Ms. Sharman said, but a ramp was expected to be built to haul them before they could be evaluated.

One of the boats, named Sefton, is believed to have been “quite submerged”, as it was the first boat to go down and its doors were believed to have been open at the time.

However, the other (Ganymede) is expected to be in “fairly good condition” with “no signs of water leakage on board.”

A third boat, the Pacemaker, teeters on the edge of the collapse. was craned to a safe location and engineers hope to be able to refloat it next week to allow it to be evaluated in a marina.

The boat’s owner, Paul Stowe, and his family barely managed to escape after being awakened in the early hours of December 22 when the boat began to slide.

“This is the scariest experience of my life. You don’t realize how powerful the water is until it washes you away,” he said.

“The ground opened up beneath us. We were actually hanging on the edge of the cliff.

“There was no bank, just a hole that went 40 feet down.”

Following the incident, Mr Stowe said he had been amazed by the support from the community in Whitchurch and other boaters, with people offering everything from “holiday villas in Italy” to “toys for cats”.

More than £100,000 was raised to help those affected and organizers said they were “blown away” by people’s generosity.

The Stowe family spent Christmas on a borrowed boat at OverWater Marina, but are now looking for new accommodation while they wait for news on Pacemaker.

“Next week we will be homeless again and looking for somewhere to live,” Mr Stowe said.

Once the last boat is rescued, the focus will shift to repairing the levee and canal.

The first stage will be the removal of waste material that cannot be used in rebuilding the canal, Ms. Sharman said.

“We will need to gradually cut the berms of this damaged area and bring in new material of the right quality to gradually rebuild the embankment,” he said.

“We’re compacting it as we go along to make sure it’s structurally sound, possibly relining that section with an impermeable layer along that levee.

“And hopefully we will reopen that channel later this year – but that will be towards the end of the year.”