Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Update - Snow last weekend

Last weekend's snow seemed to catch the council on the hop again, despite being forecast. Once again the ladder roads, Green Lanes and Wightman Road became treacherous within a very short space to time. I asked the council at what point the roads were gritted because the snow started to lay so quickly on Wightman Road that I wasn't convinced it had been gritted at all (or the ladder roads for that matter)!

I have asked the council for an update as to what went wrong and I am following up the grit bin issues too

Here is the council's response:-

Dear Cllr. Alexander,

Thank you for your enquiry.

I am afraid I cannot pinpoint the exact times when individual roads were gritted as we do not have the technology to do this at the moment, although we will have from next winter when our new Environmental Services contract is up and running.

What I can tell you is that we mobilised our gritting on Saturday morning before it started snowing but our gritters were caught in the traffic caused by the sudden and deep snowfall. I had feedback from Enterprise that it took over one hour to grit Wightman Road alone because of the traffic.

We worked through the day on Saturday into Saturday night to grit the Resilience Networks until they were all treated and passable. When snow falls so fast and so deep it can be more than our resources is able to deal with and it is a case of working through the day to restore normal service as quickly as possible. Restoring normal service was made more difficulty by the high level of traffic on the roads, probably because people were doing their Christmas shopping. The timing of the snow fall could not have been worse in this respect.

Resilience Networks were gritted again last night and they are all running fine today.

The ladder roads are Priority 1 for carriageway gritting but they are not included in our Resilience Network routes so they have not been treated since they were last gritted on Friday last week. You can find details of our all our pavement and carriageway gritting schedules on the Council web-site.

I hope this response helps to explain our actions.

20.12.10