This weekend marks four weeks since the Isle of Wight council re-closed Leeson Road in order to drill three 130m deep boreholes for land movement monitoring, following last December’s catastrophic landslide in Bonchurch.
At the end of this week the Isle of Wight council issued an update on the work taking place, advising that, “we remain on target to complete the borehole work within the stated schedule of ten to 12 weeks”, contrary to what the council leader had stated at the beginning of September.
More likely to be four to six weeks
Councillor Phil Jordan had advised OnTheWight — which was backed up in a email from the Director of Highways, Michell Love — that due to a seven-day working week (see more on that below), the completion date was more likely to be four to six weeks.
OnTheWight raised this discrepancy with the council leader who advised today (Saturday),
“Good progress has been made on the works – notwithstanding the broken bore drill issue recently – and the last of three holes is being started. This third and last bore hole is going to 130m depth.
“All being well (and I think that’s the possible rankle on finish date) we could expect the bore hole completed in the next two weeks or so.
“I am not certain of the expected delivery date of the required monitoring equipment however, and we are still discussing how much monitoring data is needed to make an informed judgement on movement. So, these ‘other’ parameters – equipment, data timeframe – are going to be crucial to getting the road open again. But we are working on a quick implementation after the drilling works which could be an interim ‘single file under lights’ until a short period of data is gathered. But these things are the subject of current discussions.
“I am hoping we will be nearer to the six weeks than the 10 weeks estimate but some of this still remains outside of our direct control.”
Seven-day working week?
It is only fair and right that the workers have some downtime, but two weeks into the road closure it also became clear that instead of there being two teams working on a seven-day working week (as the council leader said he had been led to believe), there was just one team working with a two day break every 12 days.
