Ventnor’s Belgrave Road – which had been closed for some 8-months after a major rockfall earlier this year – has officially reopened.
As previously reported by Island Echo, it was back on 8th March, that a large mass of rock fell onto the road, destroying safety railings and cascading onto Esplanade Road below.
The road was finally opened at around 16:00 after painting of double yellow lines was completed that morning.
The reopening was the culmination of weeks of repair and safety works by Island Roads on behalf of the Isle of Wight Council.
The project team, working with specialist designers and contractors, has delivered a package of measures to make the area safe and resilient. These include stabilising the cliff face (removing loose material and installing protective systems), clearing the rockfall debris, repairing retaining and parapet walls and repairing the road surface.
Taking to Facebook, Local Isle of Wight Councillor Ed Blake, said:
“We can see that the work has been completed to a really good spec, but what we need to do moving forward is really improve the Isle of Wight Council’s resilience to situations like this.
Article continues below this advertisement “The fact it took 8 months to get the road re-opened isn’t acceptable and it should have been sorted much sooner.”
Project Manager Nathaniel Saunders said:
“We’d like to thank the Ventnor community for its patience during these works.
“It has been a complex project given the confined nature of the site, the unstable nature of the rockface when we started and also some severe weather.
“But we are delighted to be re-opening the road ahead of the Christmas period and, once again, it’s been great to work with some excellent Isle of Wight companies, including Stoneham Construction, CoreFIX, G Filer Engineering, Mills & Son, Nigel Early Services, Crown Park, MG Scaffolding, Wight Building Materials, JMC Hire, Reynolds & Read, to deliver a local solution.”
Good to see the neat job that they’ve finally done, even though it took a fair (or unfair!) amount of time… I guess that Island Roads might argue that the delay gave the situation time to settle down properly. But I’m still worried about the poor badger that we observed running into the rockfall one dark evening at the end of April!
Long overdue. I am pleased it’s finally done
makes travelling much easier.
Great to see this done. We just need to find ways to truncate these kind of repairs going forward and let’s hope Council and Island Roads get much, much better at doing that.