LCC Highways/Anglian Water.

I used to drive HGV around the area and would report various pot holes and damages I saw during the day. I have just recently started to do the reporting again although I don't work anymore. I remember hitting a pothole in the dark and rain outside Cordeaux school gates and it was a deep one, called 101 Police as to me it was dangerous, and 4 hours after I reported it a red Audi hit the hole and ended up through the school fence, that hole should have been filled as an out of hours emergency! Cost me £400 about 6 months after with 2 split tyres that couldn't be seen from the outside, no point claiming as they very rarely pay out.

In the past 2 weeks I have been keeping an eye on some of the reports I have made recently, and quite honestly I am very disappointed in the action (NON) taken by LCC. One fault in particular (although now transpires it is Anglian Water), is a broken manhole in the road by Old School flats on Riverhead Road that was first reported in early January on Fix My Street as far as I can see.

The manhole frame is broken and every time a vehicle goes over it, it bounces and makes a loud banging noise that is obviously vibrating through the flats both sides of the road. It is ultimately down to Anglian Water to repair the frame, but even though the residents have resorted to stuffing socks into the frame to quieten it down, Anglian have not deemed it to be an emergency and say it could take up to 12 weeks to get the road closed to do the work. That is really not acceptable when the poor residents are suffering this 24/7 so a speedier timeline is needed in cases like this I hope you would agree.

Apparently if the tarmac breaks up around a manhole and it has been down more than two years, the responsibility lies with LCC, if it is within the 2 years it is Anglian. You could almost imagine LCC letting things get bad enough that it becomes Anglian's problem rather than repair the tarmac before the frame breaks.

Storm drain grates blocked, reply from LCC is 'we will include it in one of our 3 yearly schedules!!' April to October. Surely they need doing when it is raining not in the summer months, not that I have seen gulley suckers or road sweepers in action around Louth.

Green waste blocking the rainwater verge on A16, was piling up and starting to encroach on the carriageway, but why was that not being picked up by LCC, do they have staff actively looking around the area for problems or sitting in an office waiting on Fix My Street?

The worst thing Government ever did was take the old road tax and change it to VED. now that money is going to other things. It would be better if the Highways repaired the potholes instead of bodging them with a bit of cold lay tarmac and running over it with the transit wheels. They did a proper job in Abbey Road this week, but why cant they do them all the same? And do them earlier instead of waiting for them to start causing damage. And do they really need to cut the ditches/dykes so close to the road side, surely that extra few feet is not going to make too much difference to the farmers?