Pregnant mum who fell down 20ft drain ‘feared she would lose her baby’
A pregnant mum who plummeted down a 20ft drain has demanded an apology.
Andrea Harris was walking with her three-year-old twin girls last July when she knocked the lid of an unsecured manhole on Boydstone Road in Lochwinnoch, a village in Renfrewshire, Scotland.
The 35-year-old, who was five months pregnant, then fell down the shaft.
Andrea was rushed to Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock after her partner Stuart managed to free her from the drain.
The mum-of-five feared she would lose her unborn baby after she suffered bruised ribs and painful hematomas on her stomach as a result.
Andrea, who gave birth to healthy baby Rayne in November last year, is now embroiled in an ongoing fight to find out who is responsible for the incident.
She told the Daily Record: ‘No one wants to take accountability. I’ve been going backwards and forwards with Renfrewshire Council and other organisations for almost a year now. I’ve never had an apology.
‘I am incredibly lucky that my baby and I weren’t hurt even more. But this should never have happened in the first place.
‘I’m being passed from different organisations with no one able to tell me who is responsible for the manhole. That’s what makes me really angry.’
Andrea had just put her twin girls, Khloe and Keeva, into partner Stuart’s car when the freak accident occurred on July 22 last year.
She explained: ‘I was chatting away to the girls and the next thing I knew I was just hanging there. I’d obviously hit the drain with the back of my foot and the lid has spun round.
‘My arms were hanging over it but my body went down the hole. If it wasn’t for the lid, I’d have gone the whole way down. It’s about 20ft deep with water at the bottom.
‘I was screaming and my partner was looking about trying to find me. The kids were hysterical.’
She claims her baby bump hit off the ladder rungs inside the hole.
The incident has had a lasting impact on Andrea, from Kilwinning, and her wider family.
She said: ‘When we go out now and there’s a drain, my twins that were with me that day will walk round it. They’re petrified because they obviously watched me going down.
‘Even if I had seen that specific manhole, there’s no way I’d have walked on top of it. The concrete around the manhole was all crumbling away so it clearly hadn’t been looked after for a while.
‘I’m just glad that it was me who walked on the grass and not the twins because that doesn’t even bare thinking about.’
Scottish Water and Transport Scotland have said the drain does not belong to them.
A Renfrewshire Council spokesperson said: ‘We’re sorry to hear of this incident. As soon as it was reported to us we secured the area and reported the defect to the relevant authorities who have carried out a repair and installed a new cover.’
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