The Pothole Invasion – Potholes Ruining our Cars and Roads
Nobody is safe from these dark cringe inducing devils, any road can fall prey to the lurking pothole beast!
It’s true, many of our roads in the UK have been savaged by harsh winters and budget cuts, meaning they get left in their sorry state, or a sorry attempt to fix them is made – only to see the same pothole appear weeks or months later.
Spotting potholes has become an almost instinctive quality, with each one you encounter and almost become victim to burned and etched into your mind, to avoid a repeat close call!
Potholes occur when water gets into the little cracks in the road, as the water freezes it expands, causing the cracks in the road to widen and become large. When the ice in the cracks melts it leaves a larger space than before that is no longer supported by the frozen ice. The cars and traffic on the cracked roads forces the cracks to break further and create potholes.
Two websites I came across may be of interest, the first is http://www.fillthathole.org.uk/ this is a website that has been set up specifically to help cyclists and other road users alike alert their local council to a pothole, in the hopes of then having it fixed. All you have to do is submit a sighting, so to speak!
Fill that Hole have a league table of local councils showing how potholes were reported, and how many have been rectified. They also give a percent of how many cases notified are fixed; if you’re living in Cumbria or Cheshire West and Chester then you’re lucky to have council that have dealt with 98% and 100% of all potholes reported, lucky you!
Another website of interest doing a similar thing is http://www.potholes.co.uk/ this site encourages users to submit pothole sightings too. The potholes are then shown on a map so you can see how many there are near you!
One of the things the second website offer is a detailed step by step guide for claiming for damages caused by potholes. It has all the local council contact details and 10 steps to help you receive compensation for damage caused by pesky potholes! This is something I’d not thought of before, I mean I’d heard people speak of it, but assumed they’d just be told to go take a running jump!
It would appear some do have success in claiming damages from their local councils, but at the same time I’m not sure I would do it. Unless I’d complained tirelessly for a fair old while to find nothing done to fix the pothole, I wouldn’t bother. Mainly because when it comes to this kind of thing surely it’s stealing from Peter to pay Paul, something else will lose some or all funding to cover the costs of your damage claim? Wouldn’t it?
I understand that Councils have a responsibility to fix these holes, but surely they’d have more time and money to spend fixing them, if people reported the potholes rather than making claims for damage caused by them?
What do you think?
