New pothole-repairing machines hit the roads

The bubble wrap has been taken off and they’re now being let loose on the streets. Caithness, Skye, Ross and Cromarty, Inverness and Lochaber are each home to one of Highland Council’s new fleet of pothole repair machines.

The JCB Pothole Pro is advertised as being capable of mending your averagesized pothole at half the cost and in under eight minutes – about six times faster than traditional pothole repairs.

The total cost for the five machines is £1 million.

With so much hype around these Highland pothole machines, I joined the road crew for a repair job in Balloch near Inverness to see one of the machines in action.

As soon as I arrived on Culloden Road the all-new pothole machine got to work on a sorry-looking 19ft section of tarmac.

It was noisy though not ear-splitting and seemed quite nimble.

Matthew White, a council roadworker who has been newly-trained in using the machines, was getting ready to cut up the road from the comfort of his cab as, thanks to the machine, his days of standing out on the road with earmuffs and a body-rattling pneumatic drill are over.

It might seem counterintuitive to dig down into the road still further in order to repair it, but that’s exactly how the Pothole Pro works.

Matthew programmed the machine to gouge out a few inches down and a few inches across to make the problem patch a uniform size and its edges straighter.

This gives the new tar a much better chance of sticking and, crucially, staying stuck.

The stopwatch started and the machine began chewing up the road with neat little munches.

It only takes a couple of minutes for the road to get dug out, and all the old tar it brings up can be melted

down and used again for other jobs.

Then it was time for the hydraulic cropping tool drill to move in and start straightening all the edges.

Amazingly, the machine even cleared up its own mess.

After the straight edges were cut, a big brush head moved in to vacuum up all the mess.

I wanted to take it home to pick up all the cats’ hairs on my living room carpet.

In one quick movement, the big brush head swooped into the air and tipped old bits of road into its big back-end bucket.

We stopped the clock and saw that from start to finish the process took just over eight minutes.

What the Pothole Pro doesn’t do, however, is actually fill the pothole itself.

So next came the hot-box tarring crew who follow close behind to fill the hole with the all-important black liquid that hardens and becomes our road surfaces.

With such a neat, uniform gap to fill, it takes just a couple of minutes for the skilled crew to have it filled and smoothed over.

Surveying the speedy Balloch job alongside me was senior council roads engineer Andrew Hunter.

With his arms folded he said matter-of-factly that cutting, cropping, and cleaning a pothole to get it ready for tarring is by far the longest and most difficult part of the job.

He explained that when using typical pothole repair methods, that part would typically take up to an hour, even on a good day.

“So you could say this machine is a gamechanger,” he said.

“Using the Pothole Pro machine far more efficient.

“The aspiration is that it

will allow us to do more permanent pothole repairs.

“At the moment, we go and pour some cold tar.

“With the best will in the world, and with all the bad weather we get, it will just pop back out.

“With this machine, we can now do permanent fixes, and really we want to be doing permanent where we can.”

Highland Council has done the maths and reckon that it can repair about the equivalent of a quarter of a mile of potholes in a week with this machine.

The £1m price tag included driver training, three digging buckets and a flail that can be used for scrub cutting in the hope of making the machines more versatile.

Pothole Pro operator Matthew and his Invernessbased crew are already setting targets for themselves after reading that Stoke-on-Trent Council managed to complete four years worth of permanent pothole repairs within three months using the machine.

They say that if Stoke-onTrent can do it, why can’t they?

It’s only been out on the roads repairing Highland potholes for a couple of weeks, and Matthew says he is still “finding his feet” with the controls.

But the team is excited with progress so far and by reports of the machine’s prowess elsewhere.

SURFACING: The five Pothole Pro machines mean Highland Council road workers will be able to repair damaged roads more quickly than before.