Diana Fountain May Be Sinking

LONDON, Jan. 8, 2008 — -- It may be London's most controversial monument, and now, the Princess Diana memorial fountain finds itself at the center of a new storm.

It all began Thursday evening when Bob Monroe -- a former consultant with Cirencester Civil Engineering, the firm that makes regular repairs to the fountain -- gave an interview to the British tabloid The Sun saying that the monument was so badly built that it was now sinking.

Monroe termed the fountain, which cost more than $7 million to construct, "a disaster".

"Hundreds of liters are leaking away every day, and as a result it's causing subsidence and making the paths rise up and buckle. The only way to fix the problem is to pull it all down and start again. Otherwise it will continue to fall apart," he warned.

A visit to the fountain, which receives 800,000 visitors annually, revealed that public interest in the princess and her memorial remains high, with many refusing to believe that the fountain could be sinking less than four years after it was opened by the queen.

"I just don't believe it," Norwegian tourist Jan Ole Berntsen told ABC News. "It doesn't look like it's sinking."

"If it is sinking, every effort should be made to fix it," Californian Lesley Wilson said. "It obviously draws crowds even today," she said, pointing to the steady stream of visitors gathering around the fountain, even on a gray wintry morning.

The fountain takes the form of an oval stone ring with water inside. Visitors were initially encouraged to paddle inside it.

But a mere 24 hours after its opening, storms caused the memorial to flood. Then the water was stopped because of blockages caused by fallen leaves.

And finally, less than a month after the monument opened, three visitors injured themselves when they slipped while paddling inside the oval ring, leading to its temporary closure.

In March 2006, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee drew attention to "basic project-management failures" in planning the memorial, calling its construction "ill-conceived and ill-executed."