M60 Resurfacing, any road engineers on here?

[mattviatura]

Okay, rather than come on here and launch into a full-blown rant I thought I'd take a different tack and see if anyone who actually knows what they're talking about can explain something.

It's just been announced that a short stretch of the M60 is to be resurfaced less than ten years after it was opened due to repeated problems with "flooding and cracks".

1) Why weren't local conditions taken into account prior to construction?

2) Why is the repair work going to take seven months?

Note the lack of shouting and expletives, sensible answers only please.

[skip_1]

The flooding is due to the drains being inadequate. The flooding causes issues with the road sub-base and this leads to cracks. The cracks have been made worse over the winter.

TBH you are in for much more misery when the motorways are converted to managed motorways (average speed gantries/H/S running) which is going ahead this year and for the next few years.

[mattviatura]

How on earth were inadequate drains missed at the planning stage?

[trickywoo]

mattviatura said:

How on earth were inadequate drains missed at the planning stage?

Incompetence. Its rife don't you know.

[pilchardthecat]

mattviatura said:

How on earth were inadequate drains missed at the planning stage?

That's not planning, it's design. Not sure which bit of the M60 it is, as I don't live round there any more, but I did work on the M60 in 95/96, and the execution was a shambles, so I wouldn;t be surprised if the design was fine, but the thing just wasn't built properly

[mattviatura]

It's the newest part, Eastern side between the A57 Denton roundabout and (I think) Middleton, it'll be about five miles.

There'll be a forty mile an hour limit in force until December.

[Gafferjim]

At least that's the quiet side of the M60, well except for the morning commute. Imagine what it would be like J15 - J18!

[skip_1]

Well it's 8-20 M60-M62 section about to be made managed motorways - that'll be a nightmare

[Steameh]

mattviatura said:

How on earth were inadequate drains missed at the planning stage?

I guess it depends on the amount of previous data regarding rainfall and the like. You would never be able to build a drain to account for the worse storms, it would just be too expensive. So they build for the most likely scenarios and then some.

Could have been the ground investigation might not have been as thorough as was necessary either.