Cumbria County Council today agreed to spend an extra £1million on urgent repairs to the county’s roads after weeks of damaging weather.
The meeting of the full council in Kendal today (Thursday, January 24th) agreed to move the money from the council’s General Reserves immediately 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 22nd, the county council’s Highways Hotline handled 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 are carriageway problems such as pot holes. The single busiest day was Monday, January 21st, when some 1,400 calls were received.
According to hotline managers, this has been the busiest period since the serious bout of bad weather that caused the Carlisle floods of January 2005.
Council Leader Tim Stoddard (Conservative) proposed an emergency motion asking full council to approve an extra £500k but, debate in the chamber led to the amount being doubled on an amendment tabled by Labour Group Leader Stewart Young.
An extra £1,135,000 for highways maintenance has already been proposed in the draft budget for 2008/9. This £1million will be in addition to that sum.
The money will now be distributed between the county council's six area committees according to an existing formula for highways funding. The dedicated area engineer and the local committee in each district will oversee the work to tackle road surfaces defects in order of priority according to the risk to safety and severity of damage.
Cumbria Highways, the partnership between Cumbria County Council, Amey Infrastructure Services and Capita Symonds, have been working flat out to tackle the recent problems.
The extra £1million will pay for each district to have extra repair team geared up to help blitz the problem from Monday, January 28th. The new teams will join the extra Cumbria Highways resources that have already been deployed to tackle the issue.
The engineers and local committees will work with Cumbria Highways using calls from the public to Highways Hotline as well as its own network of inspectors to identify work.
The county council will also keep the public updated on progress with regular reports to the media and with information 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