ON the day after the latest deadline has passed for the completion of the shambolic A13 Widening, Labour’s Martin Kerin has slammed the Thurrock Conservatives’ incompetence.
In a statement, he said:
“Today is April Fool’s Day – an appropriate day for this joke of an Administration currently running Thurrock Council! If someone had to said to me back in October 2019 that the A13 widening still wouldn’t be completed by March 2022, even I wouldn’t have believed that Thurrock’s Conservatives could be that incompetent. Yet here we are, 2 years, 5 months and 5 days after the original scheduled completion date.
“The most recent reports to Council committees have stated that February or March 2022 would see the A13 widening finally completed. As always, this has turned out to not be the case. It is crystal clear why the Tories have repeatedly refused Labour’s call for an independent LGA Peer Review into this botched project on multiple occasions.
“As well as the delays, Thurrock’s residents are also bracing themselves for the final overspend bill. Unfortunately, the incompetent delays and overspending are not an April Fool’s joke – they are further evidence of the incompetence of Thurrock’s Conservatives.
“The joke has gone on too long.”
After spending 51 years in the construction industry and being part of the team that built many of the countries motorways in the LATE 60’s early 70’s (in 3 years) we built numerous bridges, put together 12 miles (the first section of the M3) + 5 miles of side road realigning and the Newbury to Swindon section of the M4 another 12 miles of motorway and 10 miles + realigning side roads and the Membury Services. All in times when technology and equipment was a bit dated compared to todays methods, recording only a handful of bell rings of the rolling straight edge, today they do topography studies, it would be interesting!
TBC employed builders to put together a widening of which I had been party to on the M25 over many years, where we call it stitching on a lane and many of these needed sheet piling to support the widening and none of those took the time taken on the A13.
Now though we have the snagging, which visually there are many areas of surfacing that will need tidying up, the running levels are also a bit undulating in places, not good on a completely resurfaced section.