6:00pm Sunday 5th September 2010
By Tom Moseley
ANOTHER of Blackburn and Darwen’s new playgrounds has been vandalised – and shocked bosses are warning they cannot afford to keep repairing it.
The play area at Bold Venture Park, Darwen, was set alight in the early hours yesterday.
Vandals dragged a wheelie bin to the middle of the play area, damaging the flooring and four rubber toadstools installed last year as part of the £2.5million Play Pathfinder initiative.
It is the latest of a spate of attacks on the borough’s new play areas:
* A tyre swing was burned out last month in Laburnum Road.
* A shelter was attacked in a playground off Burnley Road in July
* A swing was destroyed and its support posts sawn through, off Livesey Branch Road in June.
* A £50,000 play area in Newfield Drive, Higher Croft, was badly damaged by fire in October just three months after it was opened.
Back in April 2008 council bosses vowed to end the ‘no ball games culture’ after being awarded £2.5million to revamp dozens of play areas in the borough.
But now they are calling on communities to be more vigilant and help protect the facilities.
Speaking after the latest incident, Coun Michael Law-Riding, who was in charge of the scheme and is now executive member for the environment, said: “We are going to struggle to repair this with the budgets being cut back.
"And if we can’t repair them we will have to close them down.
“It’s just mindless vandalism. People are just choosing to go out and damage this stuff – it’s just crackers.
“A lot of these areas are overlooked by people, and we need help from members of the comm-unity to identify these people and tell us and the police who the trouble-makers are.”
Darwen Fire Station’s watch manager Tony Hartley said: “It’s caused about six square metres of damage to the flooring.
"I would assume they were sitting there for a while. A passer-by alerted us.”
“I know they spent a lot of money on the play area and I would imagine it's going to cost a lot of money to replace that area.
"It will have to be cordoned off.”
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