Winter Damage Repairs

Following the damage caused to Worcestershire's roads by last winter's severe weather, the Government issued extra funding to assist highway authorities in dealing with the problem.

In Worcestershire the extra funding (£3.08m) has been used to repair roads augmenting the original 2011/12 carriageway maintenance funding (which was agreed by the Council at £8.9m). Set out below is a breakdown of how it was used.

A good deal of the damage had occurred in areas that were previously in either good or reasonable condition and therefore in addition to normal data gathering methods extra inspections were carried out and every reported pot hole and other carriageway defect investigated in some detail.

From this information damaged areas were repaired by one of the following methods:

1. If the reported failure was an isolated pothole or small area of defective carriageway it was repaired by one of Worcestershire Highway's Area Response Teams wherever possible using a high quality permanent small patch repair with hot tarmac material.
   
2. If the reported failure formed part of a larger defective area that required more substantial repairs, but was still fairly isolated in nature, it became part of a programme of permanent structural patching repairs utilising high output equipment to ensure cost effective permanent repairs were achieved.
   
3. Wherever possible, larger areas of failure were included in larger surfacing works ensuring permanent repairs were made in the most cost effective manner.

Following the completion of the extra works Worcestershire confirms that £250k was used to complete over 3,000 small repairs using method 1, £1.0m was used on method 2 repairs completing work on an additional 83 sites with the remainder being allocated to 25 larger surfacing schemes.