It was once dubbed the ‘potmonster’ and could have been used to hide away magical treasures and even a small child. But one of the worst potholes we’ve ever seen has finally been filled in.
The pothole, on Ferry Road in Coalisland, County Tyrone, was first brought to our attention in 2023 when Mid-Ulster Councillor Malachy Quinn decided he needed to use his own body to illustrate how deep the cavern was that had opened up in the road.
There are potholes, then there are POTMONSTERS.
DFI need to do more than patch! What if a cyclists hits this or a motorcyclist? The danger of this is plain to see. We need a permanent solution to fixing the Ferry Road.
And a note, my feet weren’t even touching the bottom! pic.twitter.com/6AfZ0GnvVM
— Malachy Quinn (@MalachyQuinn) June 18, 2023
Scarily, as the attached video showed, his children could quite easily have slipped in and not been able to see out. “The danger of this is plain to see”, he added.
Thankfully, it’s only taken 30 months for Northern Ireland’s Department for Infrastructure (DfI) to take action, and the pothole is no more. Councillor Quinn, who represents the Torrent ward, told the BBC that potholes were “a never-ending story” and one of the biggest issues he had to deal with.
“We have fantastic work done here but if you go across my electoral area you’re hitting defects all the time, you’re hitting a lot of potholes. I could throw a stone here and probably hit another road and hit another pothole,” he added.
Not content with only condemning the ‘potmonster’ to the internet archives, the DfI have decided not to wait for another social media storm to erupt from a crack of the internet at a moment’s notice.
Instead, the DfI has announced it will survey every last nook and cranny of Northern Ireland’s road networks in minute detail, as part of a new mapping project. The ambition is to give Northern Ireland “the most understood road network in the world”. We’ll take their word for it.
The mapping will be done by Gaist, a ‘roadscape intelligence’ company that will use cameras mounted atop their vehicles to scan the surfaces to assess the levels of degradation on roads. It’s not dissimilar, in principle, to the Google Streetview cameras that traipse around the world on a regular basis.
In the press release accompanying the announcement, Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins also referred to the benefits of active travel that could come from the survey.
“This survey will give us detailed condition assessments for carriageways and footways to enable our road maintenance teams to identify areas requiring immediate attention and enable future data-driven investment decisions to be made.
“The use of technology will also support our active travel plans and assist us in the production of carbon management plans in support of the Climate Change Act,” she added.
If the survey of Northern Ireland’s near-26,000km of public roads does work successfully, then it’ll put the country far ahead of the rest of the UK. A report published in August found that road users face “a stark postcode lottery” in terms of pothole reporting and repairs.
The report, published by Cycle SOS and compiled based on Freedom of Information requests, also found that the average repair time frequently exceeded 30 working days.
1 thought on “Farewell to the “potmonster” as Northern Ireland’s worst pothole finally filled in and new Road Maintenance Strategy announced”
They’ll fill some of the
They’ll fill some of the pothiles and resurface the worst roads and then within a few weeks, the utiliies companies will come along and dig it up again. Back to square one. I wish I was joking.