Getting our roads ready for winter
As the colder and wetter weather arrives, the Council’s Highways Team have been working hard to keep the roads safe and reduce the risk of flooding.
Our Highways Team look after 551 miles of road, carrying our both proactive and reactive repairs across the whole network. At the same time, they also look after around 50,000 road gullies, making sure they’re kept clean, so they don’t flood.
Winter represents a challenging time for our roads and makes the job of our teams much harder. The freezing temperatures make potholes more likely, and the excess rainwater means there’s more chance of flooding.
However, thanks to this additional investment, we’ve been able to invest in projects that will help us deal with the increased challenges winter brings.
The investment has meant we’ve been able to:
- Hire four new repair crews, and they’ve been helping us reduce potholes across the city. From April to August, they were able to repair 1,620 defects across the city.
- Clean our gullies more efficiently. We’ve been able to carry out a detailed survey of all our gullies so we can target our work more effectively. As a result, gullies that are more likely to become blocked can be cleaned more regularly.
For more information, read our gully cleaning schedule or find more about how we grit the roads in Winter.