Police were called to a Bingley street after the road surface collapsed – leaving a 20ft-deep hole in the ground.

And one resident revealed how one of the wheels of her car started sinking through the road surfacing before it gave way and the hole developed.

Paula Sharratt, of Powell Road, Bingley, had been driving along Crownest Road in the town when a crowd of people in the road shouted for her to stop.

The front wheel of her car was sinking through the surface of the road and, as she reversed along it, part of the road surface collapsed.

The hole in the road surface revealed a 20-foot drop down into a sewer which runs underneath the street.

Mrs Sharratt said: “I had driven along Crownest Road to take something to my daughter, who was at a friend’s house on the other side of Bingley.

“I hadn’t noticed anything unusual but when I was driving back there was a crowd of five or six people who started waving and shouting for me to stop.

“I thought I had run over a child because they were really waving and shouting that it was going to sink.”

Onlookers called police when the incident happened at about 7.45pm on Friday.

The road was partially closed for safety reasons while engineers attempted to fix the hole on Saturday morning.

A West Yorkshire Police spokesman told the Telegraph & Argus: “We were called at 7.50pm about a hole in the road.

“We contacted the Council’s highways department and left it with them.”