Hampshire County Council Highways has provided the update below on progress with potholes.
For the last couple of months the Hampshire County Council Highways team have been prioritising filling, but not necessarily permanently repairing, potholes. Teams have been deployed to carry this out wherever it is safe to do so without traffic management in place.
A “fill” is significantly quicker to undertake than a permanent repair, but Highways is aware that they can sometimes break down quite quickly, particularly at higher stress sites. Some may therefore require an occasional top-up before a patching team can return to carry out a more substantive permanent repair at some point in the future. In the time taken to undertake a permanent fix between 4 and 7 temporary infills can be completed, so they are a very effective way of ensuring defects can be addressed quickly to keep the road safe. If you become aware that a fill is degrading do please report it again through the online reporting system and the team will swiftly address it.
Highways officers and their contractors are continuing to work flat-out to repair potholes and other road defects as quickly as possible. Whilst the requirement for temporary infills needs to continue for the foreseeable future, a lot more potholes are now being permanently repaired. It is still a considerable challenge, however, given the sheer scale of the problem across Hampshire, but the extra £5.9 million funding from the Department of Transport is being put to good use with additional resources already deployed.