Chorley reservoir wall repairs approved amid fear failure could shut major road

Lancashire County Council’s cabinet has approved earmarking a further £250,000 to fix the structure, which forms part of the Rivington Reservoir and runs alongside the A673 Bolton Road, near Grimeford Village. The wall collapsed in 2020 following heavy flooding and a failure of the highway drainage system.

A total of £303,000 was originally allocated for the repairs, with temporary barriers having been installed after the initial incident in order to allow the road to reopen while a full rebuild project was designed.

However, because the road is carried on top of a dam belonging to water company United Utilities, the process has been more complex than first expected - with detailed investigations into the stability of the dam proving necessary.

Cabinet members were told that the temporary solution in place for the past three years would not last indefinitely and its failure could result in lane closures on the A673 or even the entire key route – which links Chorley with Bolton – having to be shut.

The additional money to bridge the gap in funding has come from the £5.1m share County Hall has received from a £200m pot of extra maintenance money announced by the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, in his budget in March.

Of the rest of the cash, £1.5m will be used for pre-planned surface improvement schemes – including the ‘surface dressing’ of a stetch of the A59, Liverpool Road, which straddles the border of Chorley and South Ribble, between its junctions with Carr House Lane near Bretherton and the Station Road roundabout at Little Hoole, at a cost of £266,000.

Meanwhile, a million pounds will be added to the preventative “find and fix” pool - with a focus on addressing defects on Lancashire’s unclassified countryside routes – and £1m will go towards boosting the county council’s “local deterioration fund”, a part of the highways budget that prioritises pothole repairs based on criteria including the number of defects in an area, how many times road workers are called out to repair them and the volume of compensation claims they generate.

A tranche of the extra funding will also be spent on other highway infrastructure, beyond road surfaces - with an additional £1m being added to the £2.3m 2023/24 budget for the replacement of lamppost columns nearing the end of their life.