We have been liaising with our County Councillor, Tim Wotherspoon regarding the ongoing issues with standing water on our village roads. Tim is trying to gather evidence so that he can try and get some action taken to address these issues. Please read the post from Tim below and help him to help us.
Tim writes: Increasingly many complaints have been percolating through to me as chair of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Flood Risk Management Partnership about gullies that are not just slow to empty but even blocked solid. The resulting standing water is being blamed on the flood risk team, but it’s a highways issue. Vehicles moving at speed through large pools of water standing in the roads throw up spray which not only soaks cyclists and pedestrians but also splashes on to walls and damages brickwork. Irate residents themselves have been resorting to digging silt out of completely blocked road gullies and posting photographs of the piles of detritus on social media. This is not good.
I suspect that cyclical maintenance may have been deprioritised in favour of filling in potholes, given the fuss created two years ago over the state of the roads after the repeated freeze-thaw damage of the 2017-2018 winter. However, we may be experiencing an unusually wet autumn (with 3 October the overall wettest day ever across the entire country), and episodes of prolonged rainfall may become increasingly common – with a corresponding chorus of complaints.
There has been some gully emptying and drain jetting in Willingham, but if there are any instances of persisting problems, as well as logging the issue on https://highwaysreporting.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/, it would be really helpful to me in making the case for regular maintenance if you could take photographs and send them to me. Please include a note of time and location, and if possible how long the puddle lasted.
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