A terrified Billericay family escaped death by inches on Sunday after a tangled mass of heavy scaffolding came crashing down on the High Street behind them.

The accident happened just before 5pm as Karen and Colin Edmondson from Chapel Court and their 13-year-old son James headed up the High Street for a game of cricket on Sun Corner.

Just after they had walked past the Creatures Great and Small pet shop, the family were stopped in their tracks by a horrifying crash from the pavement behind them as the scaffolding which jutted out from the roof of the building suddenly collapsed.

Fortunately, nobody was hurt because the wet weather had driven most people off of the street, but the shaken family immediately realised it could have been a lot worse.

Karen recalled: "We had just walked underneath and crossed the service road when the whole lot just collapsed behind us.

"It was like a chain reaction, or like dominoes. It just peeled away from the building.

''It was an incredible noise, like the noise you get when you drop a carrier bag of bottles into an empty bottle bank.

"Fortunately there was nobody else about, but I couldn't help thinking about the old people who normally sit there on the bench seats and the kids that hang around there.

"If the weather had been better or it had happened 24 hours earlier there could have been people killed, without any doubt."

Don Wilson from the Health and Safety Executive, which is responsible for investigating such incidents, said: "We will be looking into this and will take the appropriate action.

"This sort of accident is not common but it does happen, normally when the scaffolding is not secured to the building properly.''

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