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Question from: County Councillor Amanda Jenner Subject: Motion on Drains and Flooding
Question:
Following the unanimous backing of the drains and flooding motion at Full Council on the 13th October (details set out below). Please could you confirm what steps are being taken to act on this motion in readiness for the Winter to try and prevent localised flooding caused by blocked drains/gullies?
Motion wording:
1. Direct managers of the highways teams, at the earliest opportunity before Winter months, to work with Local Members to identify drains and gullies which need to be cleared in order to help prevent localised flooding.
2. Direct resources accordingly to ensure that those drains identified are cleared and unblocked urgently before the Winter months.
Minutes: Response by the Cabinet Member:
1. Depot meetings are being scheduled through November and December 2022, managers will meet with all members to discuss all highway matters including drain and gully emptying. The Council has four Gully emptier/ Jetting machines in the County to support both county and trunk road networks, 3-4 months of every year the gully emptier lorries are working predominately on the trunk road network carrying out cyclic work and then redeployed during inclement weather dealing with additional trunk road and strategic network requests.
Members will be provided at the depot meetings with some background information regarding how this resource is to be deployed. Members are also invited to contact depots at any time if there are aware of issues that need to be raised from reports they receive from the public and we welcome support of Councillors to help identify the highway maintenance issues. Councillors will know of these issues in their areas and officers will then decide on the priority and resource.
2. Highways Teams take on board members concerns and ensure the four gully emptier/jetter’s work schedules are prioritised accordingly to ensure the critical culverts, drains and gullies are cleared and strategic roads are prioritised. Programmes will be put in place as every year prior, and blocks built into programmes to attend to the ad-hoc reports, unfortunately this will still leave gullies requiring cleaning, requiring a lot more additional resource than is available. The LHA would need more resource and machines to consider scheduling programming all the work required on the vast minor road network in Powys.
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