Masonry crashes to ground at hair salon

The foot-wide slab fell from a three-storey block of shops and flats on Craigentinny Road.

Some of the debris landed outside the CYHD hair salon, narrowly missing an emerging customer.

Ken Campbell, 74, was standing outside waiting for his wife Thelma, 68, who was inside the hair salon, when the slab came loose.

He said: "There was a young lad just about to leave the hairdressers when a piece of harling hit the ground. If anybody had been entering or leaving they could have been seriously injured or even killed, and even if someone had been walking on the pavement they could have been hit.

"It's just as well I had moved my car otherwise some of it could have struck it because it's a narrow pavement."

Trainee hairdresser Robyn McCutcheon, 16, was inside the CYHD salon when she heard a huge crash from outside at around 2pm on Thursday.

She said: "We were in the back of the shop and we heard this big crash from outside.

"I ran through and this chunk of roof had fallen on to the pavement. It just missed a customer as they were leaving.

"The debris scattered into the shop and I had to brush it out and on to the road. It could have killed someone if it landed on them."

A spokeswoman for the city council said an inspection of the property, which comprises of a row of shops on the ground floor and a mixture of council-owned and private flats on the two floors above, was carried out yesterday afternoon by a building services inspector.

She said that it had been established that there was no further danger of masonry coming loose but that any necessary work would be carried out as required.

Edinburgh has been hit by a series of high-profile masonry falls in recent years, sparking a city-wide investigation into the state of properties.

Figures previously revealed that pieces of masonry were falling from city's buildings at the rate of one every two days.