At 10am on May 11, the sound of a reversing beeper alerted me to the fact that, after many months of emails and phone calls from residents, Port Macquarie Hastings Council were finally repairing the pavement failure on the Ruins Way, between Coucal Close and Major Innes Road.
The passage of trucks and buses had forced the sheets of broken tar macadam from the road into the gutter leaving over eight metres of pothole enlarging with each rain event as the water is diverted from the gutter into the pothole scouring it larger and larger.
In the vein of the viral emails where images of road line marking directly over road kill tagged “Not my Job” or “Epic Fail” abound, our local council has entered the Epic Fail competition.
The council workers have sprayed some “black gold” over the pothole and surrounded pavement failures. In leaving the debris (broken sheets of tar and road base), from the pothole in the gutter they have cleverly ensured that the “repair” won’t last longer than the next rain shower as the water on this steep slope diverted by the rubble will scour out the couple of millimetres of spray seal.
In not filling the pot-hole but simply following its contours with the spray seal they have also ensured the road surface remains as uneven as it was prior to the repair! I suspect that the passage of the next school bus will destroy the thin layer in any case.
What an incredible waste of time and ratepayers’ money on a “non repair”.
Colin Campbell
Port Macquarie
