Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Classic Morgans (pre-CX) Beware the rogue pothole!

Thanks again Richard. I've ordered MCF0126.

I agree I had a broken tie rod over 20 years ago, went to the hardware store bought an appropriate length of screw rod, nuts and washers cut to required length put in place and tightened the nuts. Still going strong with over 50,000 miles driven and no issues, easy job to do yourself for a small outlay.

Agreed, as I understand it, if the pothole (s) are reported but not repaired the council is liable for costs of damage directly caused by failure to repair the road back to spec, I know people who have successfully claimed for busted alloy rims

I agree with Richard, contact the highways department and advise them that you will be billing them for the damage. As the road issues have been previously reported and if they have done nothing about this and I believe the pothole has to be deeper than 10 cm ( a fair bit ) , then I believe they may have a legal loading on them if damage is caused to a vehicle. This was certainly the case here in Somerset, we have a council website system to report pothole issues and in every case if the pothole was deeper than 10cm the council have been along to check within 3 working days, swiftly followed by repairs, which are not always very good, but its better than nothing. When reporting the potholes I have found it worthwhile stressing the safety implications for road users, especially motorcycles.. Lastly, its amazing how many potholes are not reported.. if eveyone started reporting them then this might bring on some better action.

Potholes might be repaired more quickly if they didn’t need two visits. It seems to be essential to have one person drive round and paint a yellow line around potholes deemed severe enough to need repair. Then 2-4 weeks later the repair team fix only the holes with yellow paint - even if adjacent holes have now become more severe. It seems to me to be a very wasteful process as it needs two teams and the process automatically creates the need for additional visits.

Spot on! DCC just repaired 2 relatively minor (and fairly easily avoided) potholes - with paint marks - about 50 yards away from the complex of potholes which did my damage. They left the latter - presumably because they hadn't been paint marked, and had been "repaired" previously, even though the whole surface was deteriorating rapidly, and on a narrow section where there's just enough width for the two lanes of passing traffic (including HGV's heading for an industrial estate also served by this road), and absolutely nothing one can do to avoid crashing into them (the potholes - not the HGVs - although, come to think of it ...). "Go figure" as the Yanks say!

If you see some repairs marked up, just get a can of the marking paint & feel free to mark up anything else that needs doing.

Yep spot on. I lived in Bucks in a private road established from 1911. This was really unadopted by the council & before we left I was the chairman of the frontagers associtaion who maintained the private bit . We paid to maintain it but the public could use it & it was a rat run to the local primary. We filled pot holes, marked speed bumps etc as per the law.
At the bottom of the road ( a 1/2 mile hill) were lots of potholes in the council bit. We paid to fill them in as we were doing the private bit only to be told off by the council. Go figure.

As our setting out engineer at work used the same spotmaking paint, I tried that some years ago - it was even the correct colour, but somehow they only did the council marked bits, some were less that a foot away, "more than mi jobs worth pal" ??

I had a broken tie rod on my Plus4SS. It was snaking uncontrollably, no longer going exactly straight, and when braking it pulled hard to the right. It was not without danger. My garage later saw that the tie rod was broken after I described the symptoms.