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The Express & Star join Dudley Council as they lead a pothole fixing blitz along Peartree Lane, Dudley.
Express & Star
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31/03/2025
The Express & Star join Dudley Council as they lead a pothole fixing blitz along Peartree Lane, Dudley.
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News
Transcript
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00:00
Councils in the West Midlands will be required to prove they're taking action to tackle potholes
00:06
or face losing cash in a new move by the government.
00:10
The Express and Star has this week launched a week-long series looking at the appalling
00:15
state of our roads and when they'll be fixed.
00:19
Here in Dudley they're taking matters into their own hands, never mind Port Patrol, it's
00:24
Pothole Patrol.
00:26
Cabinet Member for Highways and the Environment Damien Caulfield is donning his high-vis jacket
00:32
and heavy boots and joining his colleagues on Monday evening as fixing as many potholes
00:38
as they can along the busy Pear Tree Lane and the Express and Star is with the team
00:43
all the way.
00:44
OK Damien, good to see you out tonight with your colleagues, working hard, that's going
00:51
to be into the night.
00:52
As I said in the intro, councils in the West Midlands nationwide are under pressure to
00:57
fix these potholes from the central government or they could lose money.
01:01
Has that prompted some of the action that we see tonight?
01:05
It has and obviously, you know, Dudley Council, it's a priority of us to get the roads in
01:11
the Dudley Borough up to the best standard we possibly can and for me as a cabinet member
01:15
I've spent 35 years in the every road transport industry so I've got a key link to that and
01:20
it's a personal priority for me as well.
01:23
You know, my vehicles travel hundreds of thousands of miles every year so I understand where
01:29
the frustration comes from residents when they're driving over potholes, their vehicles
01:33
are being damaged and it's not a pleasant way to travel the borough's roads.
01:38
How much of a priority is fixing roads in Dudley and just how big a job is it?
01:44
Well Dudley's got over 740 miles of roads and as I've said to you earlier on, a big
01:49
change for Dudley Council was two years ago when we brought in a five year proactive repair
01:55
and resurfacing programme.
01:56
Prior to that, a lot of the repairs were being done reactively so now obviously we've still
02:02
got reactive work because roads still break up but with this proactive programme running
02:06
in the background, any roads that need full renovation will be done and resurfaced in
02:11
year one and then repairs that you see tonight that will extend the lives of roads between
02:15
seven and ten years.
02:16
If the roads there are less damaged then we can fit those into year two, three, four,
02:20
five and that programme will continue to evolve as we're going along.
02:25
And how does Dudley compare to other councils in the Midlands and nationwide?
02:29
We hear a lot of complaining about potholes in Coventry, in Birmingham, in Bronzegrove
02:34
over the last few weeks, how does Dudley compare to that in terms of the amount of roads they
02:40
have to fix?
02:41
Well I think it's evident, I mean I travel from Staffordshire, I work just on the outskirts
02:46
of Staffordshire.
02:47
When you drive from Staffordshire, you come into the Dudley boundary, then you go from
02:50
Sandwell to Wolverhampton and to Walsall, the Dudley roads are far superior to any of
02:56
our neighbouring local authorities.
02:58
So that's evident that you can see how fully committed we are to resurface the roads in
03:02
the borough.
03:03
And as we mentioned, public transport, haulage, motorists, cyclists, what's your message to
03:11
the general public who use the roads in Dudley borough over the pothole issue?
03:16
Yeah, Dudley Council's fully committed to repair as many potholes now and obviously
03:22
resurfacing work that we're doing going forward now.
03:24
As you've already mentioned, we've got extra funding this year and we've got extra funding
03:28
next year.
03:29
So we'll be carrying out more resurfacing work, we'll be carrying out more partial resurfacing
03:34
work and patch repairing, as you can see behind me, and then we'll get to the extent there
03:40
where we'll get the vast majority of the borough's roads to a very good standard.
03:43
Well, that police car wasn't going to stop, was it?
03:46
No, it wasn't.
03:47
OK, well, thanks for talking to us and let's have a look at what's going on tonight.
03:50
OK.
03:51
We're here with Mark Reeves, Senior Engineer, on a busy Monday night for your guys and the
03:57
crew.
03:58
Just talk us through a little bit, if you can, what they're doing in this process here.
04:02
So what we're doing, we're doing some structural potholing, which is basically trying to create
04:07
some more longevity on the road surface.
04:11
We're calling them like blitz potholes and what we're mainly doing is dealing with these
04:15
locations that are just too busy to deal with during the day.
04:19
So we've put together a programme of, like I said, blitz potholes.
04:24
This is the third batch of the work that we've put together and almost completed.
04:30
And I imagine it's an ongoing process with the amount of potholes, the maintenance of
04:36
the roads.
04:37
Is it a bit of a blitz at the moment?
04:40
That's what we're trying to do.
04:42
What we're doing on the night time blitz is dealing with the awkward locations to try
04:46
and minimise the disruption of the road users during the day.
04:51
This is an extremely busy road, not just for road users, but it's very industrial as well.
04:58
So if we tried to carry out this work during the day, we'd be disrupting both the commercial
05:03
and the public users as well.
05:05
Hence why we're here now on an evening carrying out the work.
05:08
Still busy on an evening, but motorists are responding well to the stop go signs and I'm
05:13
sure they'll appreciate the work that you're doing.
05:16
Yeah, they do respond really well to it.
05:18
The guys who are carrying out the work, one of our term contractors, the TM is good.
05:24
They're always in touch, always in control.
05:26
We make sure the traffic flows freely as well, so you need one guy to watch and like I said
05:31
they're constantly in radio control.
05:33
Especially if we get an emergency vehicle come through, we make sure that we get them
05:36
flowing through with no disruption.
05:38
As you saw earlier on, with that police car coming through quite quick, there was no disruption
05:43
to it.
05:44
Well good to see you and good to see the work going ahead.
05:47
Yeah, and you.
05:48
Okay, thanks.
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