ANGRY relatives have criticised safety conscious council officials who are digging up gravestones after a survey revealed they are a public safety hazard.

Graveyards throughout the Wyre area have come to the attention of council environment inspectors after a risk assessment survey by Blackpool firm, Granlite, condemned memorials in Poulton and Preesall.

Although the Wyre the area has no history of serious cemetery-related incidents, three people have died and five left injured by toppling headstones in other parts of the UK over the last ten years.

Now, in a bid to avoid any future accidents, a team from the Environmental Services department have toured three sites marking-out "at risk" graves with a bright yellow plastic cover and uprooting those which are an immediate threat. They will then use cemetery records to trace the relatives of stones labelled as dangerous, who will be asked to pay for a reinstallation, or the memorial will be buried -- along with those who can not be traced -- in a plastic wrapper inside the grave.

So far around 200 gravestones have been deemed unsafe and 25 laid down at Preesall Cemetery and more than 500 have been marked out and 34 laid down at sites in Poulton.

The council say that a full photographic record of the grave will be kept on file and families will be able to re-erect the memorial at any time, but local people are horrified.

One furious relative, who lives on Park Lane in Preesall, said: "This is such a dreadful thing to do to a person's final resting place.

"Cemeteries are not a playground or a public footpath, they aren't places for random members of the public to visit.

"The people who do go to them are there for a specific purpose which is to pay respect to their departed loved ones and if the grave is a danger then families will opt to replace it themselves.

"Opening the top of a burial place to house a headstone is heartless and cruel and an unthinkably immoral way of covering the council over personal injury claims."

Another relative, who frequently visits Poulton's New Cemetery on Garstang Road said: "I can understand that the council need to identify potential threats to the public and deal with them. But money doesn't grow on trees, people often struggle to pay for a burial in the first place and they might not be able to afford to pay to fix a headstone straight-away.

"A headstone is often the only physical thing you have left to pay your respects to and I know it would break my heart to think of my dead family member having theirs buried with them -- even if it's only for a matter of hours.

"There should be some sort of other way of solving the problem."

Wyre Borough Council's Environmental Contracts Manager, Bill Acton said: "We are aware that anything involving graves and the memory of a loved one is an emotive issue.

"But we have to bear in mind the potential for problems and do what we can to minimise the risk of accident."