Stewart Rotherham
Recent activity
Comments (4)
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Comment on: Cornwall County Council admits to leaving 80% of roads untreated after two killed in coach crash
I have every sympathy with the people who were killed and injured and their relatives, but to simply blame either the county councillors or their staff completely misses the cause of this problem. Unfortunately, winter highway maintenance is a real "Cinderella service" due largely to the way in which local government finance works. By this I mean that there are peaks in demand say one year in ten. LG finance is designed for a regular pattern of expenditure, year on year, and if you have not spent it this year it is difficult to justify having the money in the pot for next year. The system makes it very difficult to save up in the good years to be able to deal with the bad years. A good example of this is in the next-door county of Devon, where the workforce is being cut to balance the extra costs of repairing an unusually high level of highway damage caused last winter. These problems are nothing new, but it is certainly about time that we worked out a way of dealing with them!
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Comment on: Collapsed Workington bridge inspected in 2008
First impressions, taken only from news broadcasts, would suggest that the most likely cause of this spate of bridge faifures is bed scour, which is notoriously difficult to examine in the routine inspections. It is probable that the bridge foundation went as deep as the technology that was then available would permit, but in an exceptional event such as this the entire river bed is likely to be in motion for a depth of several metres below the normal river bed level.
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Comment on: Engineer shortage blamed for Highway Agency cost hikes
The answer to a shortage of Civil Engineers in the HA is simple, and in the HA's hands. Recruit some. Pay them a sensible salary - they don't have to compete with professional footballers or merchant bankers (although that would be nice!). Perhaps more seriously, this could be the beginning of a realisation by clients that Civil Engineers bring something special to the table - the knowledge and understanding of how to make very simple materials do very complicated things pretty reliably, in the situation where every job is a prototype.
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Comment on: Surrey council terminates contract
Another, more insidious cause of this problem is the fact that the politicians (of whom, as an Election Agent as well as a Civil Engineer, I am one) have found that cutting 5% off the highways budget in a year does not lead - immediately - to catastrophe. If, however, you repeat this often enough, there is insufficient money to do the job properly. We, as professional engineers, are however, so desperate for work (any work) that we are willing to take on these underfunded contracts and endeavour to make the best of things. The result, in terms of quality of work, if not quality of paperchase and achievment of KPI scores, is sadly inevitable.
