The dangerous day the canal collapsed at Dudley Port in 1899 - a disaster with echoes of Shropshire's 'sinkhole' drama
It's amazing no-one was killed.
Water cascaded out of the canal, as its sides collapsed. The towpath destroyed, six miles of canal drained dry, and 40 miles of waterway taken out of action.
But this is not the Shropshire canal disaster in Whitchurch last month. It was Dudley Port in 1899.
More than 126 years separate the two incidents, but the stories are uncannily similar.
The dramatic collapse in Whitchurch before Christmas was initially put down to a sinkhole, but it later emerged an embankment had collapsed, sending narrowboats into a deep chasm and millions of gallons of water onto surrounding fields.
While Shropshire's collapse was in a relatively rural area, the 1899 drama happened a mile-and-a-half from Dudley town centre.
Dudley Port today seems little more than a backwater, a name on the railway timetable, a place you go through rather than to - unless of course you live or work in the area.
But in the 19th century, it was very different indeed. The emergence of the limestone, coalmining and iron industries in the second half of the 18th century had established the Black Country as the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution, and the Birmingham Canal became its main artery to the rest of the country.
