More 'Dragon Patchers' to repair potholes

Devon County Council is looking into ordering more of them

More ‘fire-breathing dragons’ are set to be let loose on Devon’s roads in a bid to hunt down potholes.

The Dragon Patcher – so called because it uses flames to dry out potholes in cold or wet weather – dries out the road then cleans the surface with compressed air and seals the pothole with a stone mix and hot bitumen emulsion.

It has been trialled in the county over the last year, and its success in repairing potholes means that Devon County Council is looking into ordering more of them.

One was initially ordered but over the summer period a second machine was mobilised to take advantage of the better weather.

Cllr Ray Radford at Tuesday’s Corporate, Infrastructure and Regulatory Services Scrutiny Committee asked how successful the trial of using the Dragon Patcher has been.

Meg Booth, Chief Officer for Highways, Infrastructure Development and Waste, responded by saying that the trial has been a sufficient success that they are set to consider ordering more.

She said: “We have decided to invest in more Dragon Patchers. We are looking at it as a way of resolving the issues on the minor road network. We have trialled it and the cost of reactive repairs compared to the cost of using the Dragon Patcher, and the lack of problems occurred on the roads it has been on.

“Some roads had considerable amount of defects prior to it, and 12 months later, very few reports of potholes, and those are not related to the work of the Dragon Patcher. The tests have been good and it early days yet, but been sufficiently good enough for us to consider ordering more.”

She said that primarily they will tackle the minor road network, but they want to trial it on the more major road to see how it fares, and said Middlemoor roundabout in Exeter was somewhere they would looking to trial it on.

Her report to the meeting added that as a result of the wet weather since August, there has been a steady increase in reported potholes, up to 3,395 in December.

She added: “The continued increase in demand plus the Christmas break has been a challenge to manage. We continue to work with Skanska to prioritise resources to reduce the risk to the travelling public, but despite the current difficulties the number of potholes recorded in 2019 were a third less than recorded in 2018.”

Cllr Alistair Dewhirst, chairman of the committee, said that no-one was ‘talking about potholes’ until the month of rain that we have had and that it is the wet weather causing the problems, but added: “The quality of the repairs is definitely better than it was.”

Mrs Booth added that because the weather is not right for the repairs the council is trying to do, some potholes repairs have not fully held, so some potholes will have to be revisited.