Cumbria County Council will today discuss finding an extra £500,000 to spend immediately on urgent repairs to the county’s roads after weeks of damaging weather.
The meeting of the full council in Kendal will today (Thursday, January 24th ) decide whether to move the money from the council’s General Reserves so that extra resources can be put to work from Monday.
The recent combination of freezing weather and heavy rain has wreaked havoc with road surfaces across the county. The freeze-thaw cycle and recent flooding has left an unprecedented number of carriageway defects and other problems on Cumbria’s roads.
Between January 10th and midnight on Tuesday, January 22, the county council’s Highways Hotline handled with more than 5,000 calls from the public. In that time hotline operators logged almost 1,000 separate flooding incidents and around 2,000 highways defects most of which will be carriageway problems such as pot holes. The single busiest day was Monday, January 21st, when some 1,400 calls were received.
According the hotline managers, this has been the busiest period since the serious bout of bad weather that caused the Carlisle floods of January 2004.
Council Leader Tim Stoddard will propose an emergency motion asking full council to approve the funding.
An extra £1,135,000 for highways maintenance has already been proposed in the draft budget for 2008/9. This £500k would be in addition to that sum.
Cumbria Highways, the partnership between Cumbria County Council, Amey Infrastructure Services and Capita Symonds, have been working flat out to tackle the recent problems.
If approved, the £500,000 will pay for extra repair teams geared up to help blitz the problem from Monday, January 28th. If the plan goes ahead they will join the extra resources that have already been deployed to tackle the issues with various highways response teams diverted to deal with flooding and carriageway repairs.
Cumbria Highways will use calls from the public to Highways Hotline as well as its own network of inspectors to identify work. The new Operational Control Room will play a key role assigning repair work on a priority basis using the distribution of the reported and outstanding defects on the system.
The county council will also keep the public updated with regular progress reports to the media and posted on the county council website.
Repair teams will be based at the main depots and will work to clear the defects in all the county council local committee district areas. They will use hot materials but some repairs will be of a temporary nature to help eliminate the backlog and remove danger. Some machine-based permanent repairs will be done where the extent of the damage is beyond a pot hole repair.
Anyone wishing to report a highways problem can call the Highways Hotline on 0845 609 6609.
ENDS
Media enquiries to Justin Hawkins, Media Officer on 01228 606334