Wednesday 30 August 2017

Wainwright aims high on England’s steepest A-road

John Wainwright & Company Ltd recently completed a resurfacing job on one of the steepest roads in the country.
The A39 at Porlock Hill in West Somerset has a gradient of 1 in 4 (25 per cent). When Somerset County Council sought a contractor to resurface it, Wainwright leapt at the chance to test its mettle in a challenging environment.
“There’s routine road maintenance and then there’s routine maintenance on a hill with a 1 in 4 gradient,” said Councillor David Fothergill, Somerset County Council’s cabinet member for highways. “Clearly, this was no ordinary resurfacing job, and required specialist equipment as well as harnessing the expertise of our team.”
The specialist equipment in question included an integrated paver and an all-terrain forklift truck that came all the way from Germany.
Because of the steepness of the hill, which is on the edge of Exmoor National Park, safety barriers were erected to protect the workforce and nearby properties.
“Porlock Hill was certainly a challenging job for our team,” remarked Lee Seviour, Wainwright’s general manager, surfacing. “It involved two weeks of concerted effort, including one week of 24/7 closure to the road. The fact we finished on time and on budget is testament to a lot of hard work, careful organisation and forward planning.”

The material for the job was supplied from Wainwright’s Avonmouth asphalt production facility. It included Wainwright’s proprietary 14mm Elastermat PSV 68 Heavy Duty Dense Asphalt Surface Course, utilising a rubberised binder that was especially well-suited to the steep gradient on Porlock Hill.

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