Cllr Kevin Deanus, the Cabinet Member for Highways, has announced that Surrey County Council is in the process of implementing its news 'find and fix' strategy within highways.
In summary, if teams find additional potholes in the vicinity when at the roadside repairing reported potholes, they will fix them, in order to avoid repeat visits and meet target timescales. This is in contrast to the current system where teams only repair what has been reported.
This process is starting now, and the IT system is being changed to allow the gangs to add more potholes as they find them whilst on site.
Currently the gangs are being trained, and there will need to be some amendments to the automated customer notifications and updates, to ensure the correct information is sent out. There is also a need to identify and maximise the use of other planned road closures to fix defects.
This new approach is on top of a number of other improvements that have been made with regards to the safety defect service in recent months including:
- Introduction of oversized defect repairs. This is one of the biggest changes that has been adopted and aims to fix multiple defects in one patch size of between 2 and 15m2. The larger patch repair is more resilient and lasts longer than multiple small patches
- Introduced mobile hot boxes and additional hot boxes in depots so the gangs have sufficient material of good quality to carry out all the repairs required
- Changed operational delivery depots for greater county coverage, improving response time and efficiency of gangs i.e. so, they spend less time travelling and stuck in any traffic
- Trialling different repair materials, the use of a mobile hot asphalt batching vehicle and using the JCB Pothole Pro unit.