Potholes

Travelling by road in my parishes has been interesting, to say the least, over the past few months. Potholes have been opened up in roads in every part of the land, due to a combination of poor investment in road maintenance and last winter's seriously wintry conditions.

My patch straddles two counties. Powys did temporary fills fairly quickly, and since then have done quite an impressive amount of resurfacing, in our area anyway (maybe we're just lucky, and other parts of the county haven't fared so well, I don't know).

Shropshire, however, seems to have done very little temporary filling. Many months ago, people came out and painted yellow lines around the worst of the potholes. Then, it seems, they sat back and waited for the pothole fairies to come and fill the holes, which of course, they didn't. Later, as new holes had appeared, people came out and painted white lines round these ones. And I think they had another go with the yellow paint after that. Drivers had resorted in some cases to driving down the middle of the road, while others swerved violently from side to side. The holes, for most part, remained unfilled.

My own personal bill came to £250, or thereabouts - the cost of two tyres. The first of these was damaged - I think - by a very deep pothole on the main A490 near Chirbury. I can't be sure, as I only observed the problem a few days later - seeing a bulge in the sidewall as I washed the car. By then, Shropshire Council had (somewhat surprisingly) filled that particular hole!

The second one went in a more spectacular way, on the lane between Chirbury and Priestweston. A huge hole has opened in the lane a little way short of Priestweston village, largely due to the heavy rainstorms we've had. A culvert has collapsed, it seems. I swerved to my right to avoid it. Many previous drivers had done the same, resulting in the erosion of the verge on that side, leaving some nasty rocks projecting out. One of those pierced my sidewall, there was a loud bang and I limped into the village, fortunately finding a safe place to put the car, and a parishioner with a phone to call the AA.

My car does not carry a spare wheel, and the stuff they give you to repair a tyre stood no chance with this sort of tear. The AA man, bless him, managed after several tries to close the gap with a nut and bolt, closing onto large washers on the inner and outer wall. He then accompanied me on my slow journey home, re-inflating the tyre on three occasions as we found places to stop. I could have been waiting many hours for a flatbed truck otherwise!

Our local County Councillor, Heather, organised a public meeting earlier this week at Priestweston Village Hall to test public opinion on the pothole situation - particularly as the Council's response to complaints and claims regarding "the big hole" has been to close the road, which is the main route into one of the less easily accessible villages on my patch. It is still passable, with care, as I proved the other day - but of course if any further damage had been caused I would have had no claim. Not that I have claimed - I was going to replace that tyre anyway by the end of the summer. I just want them to get on and fill the holes.

The senior officer who attended the meeting had to endure some stick; but he made promises that the work on most potholes would be completed within two weeks or so (a new machine has been hired in, and it will be based in our part of the county). Re-opening the road to Chirbury will take longer, because the culvert will require extra work. The best he could promise there was that work should be under way during August. We'll see. It's also worrying that substantial amounts of money have had to be diverted from the already shrinking fund for capital projects, to enable this work to be done. The pothole scourge is partly the result of inadequate capital investment, after all.

But it's clear that things need to be done better than they have been. It's certainly not clear to me why the people filling the holes should not themselves be allowed to identify what holes need filling, for example. And comments like "I can't fill that one, it's not on my list," are just ludicrous.  Meanwhile, the summer heat (combined with passage of heavy vehicles) has started to do serious damage to the road surface in some places, while holes that have been there since January remain unfilled.

I should mention that Powys apparently has the worst maintained roads in Wales . . . but on my patch they're better than the Shropshire roads.