Repairing potholes video transcript

Footage of Kent County Council's highway team repairing potholes with industrial equipment.

Alan Casson, our Strategic Asset Manager, speaks about how potholes form, and how we repair them.

Highways team member: "Potholes occur because of bad weather. It’s usually because of cold weather and wet weather. And those two things together means that the road surface can break up.

I expect that our highway stewards have been out and inspected them to decide on the appropriate repair to make, and we therefore then issue instructions to our contractors. They come out and repair them as quickly as possible.

Most of the repairs we’re doing now are permanent repairs. We sometimes need to do temporary repairs because of road conditions, because it's wet, for example, or because it's a busy junction and we can't block the road for too long.

The important part of this is to get the road repaired as quickly as possible so that people can use it safely.

Our main responsibility is safety of road users. If we come across a pothole, we want to repair it as quickly possible so that people don't get harmed.

That does involve some interruptions to road users sometimes and disruption, but we try to manage that in a way that is as least impactful as possible.

They’re a dedicated bunch. We've got very committed work crews, very professional work crews, very professional highway inspectors and highway stewards who are like us, committed to maintaining a safe network.

The guys that do pothole repairs are also the people who drive at night to grit the roads during this time. So that is a big challenge on us, it has taken away resource; we have to maintain roads safely during winter conditions.

We've got a 5,400 mile road network in Kent. That's more than the motorway network in the whole of England. It's a big network it’s a complicated network. We recognise that it's the key enabling asset in the whole of Kent, that allows for everything else to happen, work to happen, emergency services, business, growth; all these things are dependant on a good road network.

Most of our maintenance is planned in order to avoid these things happening in the first place. We have complicated systems where we survey roads mechanically. We've got IT systems that will model deterioration, and for the most part, we actually do intervene before potholes occur.

[Caption with voiceover]

"Our crews are busy repairing potholes in Kent.

You can report potholes online at kent.gov.uk/potholes"