THE owner of a car repair garage today vowed his business would continue despite the collapse of his workshop in a freak accident.

Colin Stothart was working at his business, Hare and Hounds Garage on the corner of Newchurch Road and Four Lane Ends, Stacksteads, when a Volvo digger he was driving went out of control at just after 9am yesterday.

He said he had been moving the 15-tonne digger out of the way when it ran away and he saw the roof of the building start to wobble.

The next thing it had collapsed on on the property.

Colin, who has owned the business for 16 years with his wife Teresa, said: "The digger just seemed to run away and the bucket hit the corner of the wall and roof and then it collapsed like a pack of cards."

He was not injured and fortunately he had just removed all but one of the customers' cars and vans that had been inside the garage.

He expects the damaged vehicle to be a write-off.

He said: "I have just had the building inspector round and he said the reason it collapsed was because the digger hit a roof truss.

"Because of the type of construction it didn't have to move far for the whole building to collapse." Colin said: "I don't know what I am going to do. I will have to put everything on hold while I get sorted but I will get up and running again. I will bounce back."

Eyewitness Daniel Usher was working at BJ's Glass across from the garage at the time of the accident.

He said: "I was helping to load glass into a van and I saw the garage owner back a digger up on the car park and it looked like he was swinging it round when we just heard this big crash.

"The roof slid towards the road and then the whole building just came down. "Some people then ran out into the road and started moving the bricks off the main road.

"There is something definitely wrong with the building if it could come down so easily.

"If someone had been inside they would have had no chance."

Firefighters, police and paramedics were called and there were concerns someone may be trapped in the wreckage of the building.

Bacup Sub Officer John Lord said: "We soon established no-one was trapped so we made sure that the property was safe, the electricity supply was safe and there were no gas cylinders inside.

"We then called the building inspectors out."

Despite the collapse, the busy Newchurch Road which connects Waterfoot and Stacksteads remained open.

A spokesman for Bacup Police said: "The incident is being treated as an accident."

A spokesman for the Health and Safety Executive said: "The incident has not been reported to us.

"It sounds like a traffic accident rather than an accident in the workplace."