Council bosses have apologised to a disabled man after contractors completing the £6m Swinton Greenway scheme left debris in the street which caused him to fall. Glenn Kennedy, 57, suffers from osteoarthritis and uses two sticks to walk.
On Sunday, May 22, he and his wife Lisa in their car to their home in Folly Lane, Swinton. There are double yellow lines outside their terraced home so they park around the corner on South Avenue.
After Glenn got out of the car, he got his sticks caught on one of the small lumps of tarmac which had been left by the workmen. "Luckily, Lisa managed to catch me and that prevented me from hitting the ground," said Glenn, who is waiting for a double hip replacement operation.
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"The work on the Swinton Greenway route finished in January, but the contractors kept coming back to redo bits and pieces of the scheme that weren't right." He said that one of the sections of the project which needed correcting was the resurfacing of South Avenue.
"They resurfaced the road, but afterward there were all these little lumps of tarmac left behind," continued Glenn, a former retail manager. To anyone who is completely able-bodied, this might seem trivial, but for someone like me who needs a smooth surface to walk across, it is very dangerous.
"I even met one woman with a pram who was struggling because of the lumps of tarmac." Glenn said debris like an unused sandbag had been left on the pavement for weeks by the workmen and was still there when the Local Democracy Reporting Service visited him.
"I mentioned all this to the supervisor and told him how dangerous it was," said Glenn. "They came back to tidy it up, but they didn't do a very good job and had to return several times. I am not interested in claiming compensation, I just want people to be aware of how dangerous these things can be."
A Salford City Council spokesperson said: “The health and safety of our residents are of the utmost importance and we hastily investigated Mr Kennedy’s report about potential safety hazards caused by the works undertaken at the junction of Folly Lane and South Avenue. Upon investigating, we determined that there was a small amount of debris in the Folly Lane area at the time of Mr Kennedy’s report and that this debris was swiftly removed by Casey, the contractor for the works.
“Whilst it is common for small amounts of debris to be present on live construction sites, we have been clear with Casey that greater care must be taken when undertaking works close to residents' homes and we are sorry for the trouble that the works have caused to Mr Kennedy.”
A spokesperson for Casey said: “Like Salford City Council we consider the health and safety of members of the public to be of the utmost importance and once informed of the matter took immediate steps to investigate and respond back to Mr Kennedy. We also thanked Mr Kennedy for taking the time to share his experience as it is important to us that we take the opportunity to continually improve our service delivery."
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