Mark Cank fills in another pothole

Other exceptional factors have conspired to make this the most widespread potholing season in motoring history.

Ironically, the very sword that has been used to fight treacherous, icy road conditions – salt – has only added to the hole menace.

“Grit speeds up the deterioration,” says Andy.
“We need to grit but the flipside is that there’s more corrosion and you get more potholes.”

On top of this, numbers of cars on county roads are at an all-time high. And cars are a pothole’s worst enemy because once a one appears, vehicles driving over them only open them up further.

Says Andy: “These days there is an expectation for people to travel to work. Some live in rural locations but might travel to Birmingham – so there are more cars on the road and more people travelling.”

A further headache to heap on to our potholing woes is the number of water pipes that have burst as a result of the freeze, Andy explains. Extra water within the fabric of the road equals more potholes.

AA president Edmund King has already described the state of our roads as “a million scars of the worst winter in 30 years”.

Right now, potholes are so prolific  that they even have their own website – ingeniously named potholes.co.uk

The site says that potholes are a major factor in causing axle and suspension failure, which counts for a third of mechanical issues on UK roads and costs British motorists an estimated £2.8 billion every year.

It claims that UK authorities currently pay out more than £50 million in compensation claims due to poor roads.

But Mr King says crumbling roads cost almost as much in compensation, accident claims and hospital admissions as the price of repairing our roads, he says. Rising compensation claims are forcing many authorities to spend more on running repairs.

As Ray Jex and Mark Cank arrive at yet another emergency pothole and spring into action in their hi-vis outfits, it is clear that highways teams are fighting a hole-ey war to keep county roads safe.

“I’ve never seen them this bad, but there wasn’t the amount of traffic 50 years ago,” says Ray.

“We’ve had some that take a tonne of tar – the size of the back of the wagon.”