Council receives extra cash to help cover big freeze bill

CARMARTHENSHIRE is to receive a share of a £15million cash boost to help cover the cost of the recent big freeze.

The Welsh Assembly Government has announced additional funding of £8million to assist local authorities to deal with urgent road repairs and replenish their salt stocks.

It comes on top of £7 million announced last week to fix potholes, bringing the total amount of extra funding to £15 million.

Carmarthenshire will receive a total of £1.126million to spend on pothole repairs, frost damage and purchasing salt.

Potholes are caused by severe weather, particularly prolonged cold weather; water lies in cracks in the road and during periods of sub-zero temperatures it turns into ice and expands, causing the surface of the road to break up resulting in deeper-than-usual potholes.

The council’s executive board member for technical services Councillor Philip Hughes said: “We welcome this extra money from the Welsh Assembly Government which will be used to target the worst-affected roads in Carmarthenshire.

“Like all local authorities in Wales we already have a substantial highways maintenance backlog and this winter’s extreme weather conditions will undoubtedly put added pressure on already stretched resources.”

The council has spent more than £2 million on patching and other reactive repairs in 2010.

It anticipated the council will have spent more than £2 million on repairing defective sections of road by the end of March 2010 as a result of the severe weather.

The council’s director of technical services Richard Workman said “We have a duty to keep the roads safe and therefore our initial response when potholes are identified is to fill them in as a semi-permanent treatment to reduce risk to the travelling public and then follow this up with a permanent long-term solution if need be.

“It is more cost effective to do deal with the problems in this way as we can then prioritise works by formulating a rolling programme of larger scale repairs that range from extensive patching to major resurfacing works. This additional grant money will be used to undertake such works.”