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When The Road Hits Back

Wheels CartoonYou remember just after Christmas I was complaining about the potholes in Corrandulla village? Perhaps I should have given credit to the County Council for getting them all patched just a week or so later.

Bloody glad I didn’t though, because the fucking things are back already. What did they use to fill them, loose gravel and spit? Once again, a drive to the shops is more like an amphibious assault up a defended beach.

It’s damaged our car. One of the headlights has failed. At least, I thought it had. I was just going to remove the bulb today to find a replacement, but wisely I gave it one final test first. (OK, I’d forgotten which one had blown.) Weirdly, it worked this time.

A little investigating, and I notice the right bulb connector is hot. Much too hot – melted and blackened. It must have come loose and been shorting. I pushed it back on tightly and it seems to be working all right since, but it will need to be replaced. And soon, because the NCT¹ is coming up and they probably don’t take kindly to a burning smell coming from the engine compartment.

I can’t prove it was the potholes that shook it loose of course. It might have been, say, trained enemy marmosets.

What worries me more is the other roads they repaired, particularly the one between here and Headford. This is my favourite local drive. It’s excellent exercise for the learner, full of blind bends, blind hills, a hidden entrance or two, turns with lousy camber. Sometimes all these at once. Challenging. OK, dangerous. Certainly, plenty dangerous enough without the extra hazard of holes big enough to bite a wheel off.

They still haven’t finished repairing it. If it’s being done to the same quality as Corrandulla, then logically they are never going to finish.

  1. National Car Test. That was an easy one, wasn’t it?

3 replies on “When The Road Hits Back”

In some areas you can’t fix potholes cheaply*. The most common ways for cheap fixes to become unfixed is water. If the water doesn’t drain quickly enough then cheap fillings wash away.

*In theory you can never do it cheaply but some cheap fixes last longer than others and that’s good enough for government work.

That would seem to be the case here, because there hasn’t been much frost since these repairs were made. There has though been a lot of rain.

But there is always a lot of rain. To fill in the potholes with aspirin, as they seem to have done, begins to sound like the County Council actually making work for itself. And that is something we have neither the time nor the money for.

They were out treating them again today. Putting little piles of pebbles and lukewarm tar in each one. Looked like rabbit droppings.

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