Firm up against clock to resurface M6 after crash

A company which resurfaced a large section of a motorway after a crash said it called in lorries from all over a county to complete the job in half the usual time.

The northbound carriageway on the M6, in Cumbria, was closed for 12 hours after a lorry crash spread mud and fuel across the road on 12 April, causing heavy traffic delays.

Dinsdale Contracts Ltd, from Appleby, said diesel and other fluids had contaminated such a big area of the road near Penrith that it had to replace the surface on all four lanes.

A National Highways spokesperson said the carriageway was closed for the "safety of all road users" and that the clean-up operation was "complex".

Dinsdale said it worked overnight to resurface the area, which was about three-quarters of the size of a football pitch.

It added it had a team on site ready to start within three hours of being called on the Friday afternoon.

The company's manager Joe Dinsdale told BBC Radio Cumbria that when he arrived on site, the surface was slippery "like an ice rink", and letting traffic back onto it would have "risked people's safety".

He apologised to drivers stuck in queues for the "inconvenience".

Mr Dinsdale said nobody wanted to cause that "kind of disruption", especially on a Friday, and believed National Highways made a hard decision, but "the right one", to keep the motorway closed for resurfacing.

Long queues built up on the M6 itself from the Tebay to Shap junctions, and also on the A6, which was used as a diversion from Shap to the A66 at Penrith.

The company's trainee quantity surveyor Georgia Coleman said it was a rush to assemble the workers, lorries and specialist equipment.

She said: "We finally got the call to start planning at around 13:30, and I believe we had men sat on site ready to go at 16:30."

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She said Dinsdale assembled a team of 16 waggons, some from as far away as west Cumbria.

The team took away 320 tonnes of damaged road surface after it had been scraped off, and delivered another 320 tonnes of replacement asphalt, brought from two separate quarries, which worked overnight to supply the project.

Mr Dinsdale said a job of that size would normally be scheduled over two nights.

This time, he said, the resurfacing, line painting, and insertion of reflective studs was finished at about 04:00 BST on 13 April, and the surface needed to harden before the motorway could re-open.

A National Highways spokesperson said the M6 northbound was closed for the "safety of all road users after a lorry overturned, spilling diesel and hydraulic oil over all three lanes of the carriageway."

A large section of the central reservation barrier was damaged, they added.

"Teams worked all day and overnight to have the road safely reopened as soon as possible but due to the nature of the spillage, this operation was complex and required around 200m of road to be resurfaced," the spokesperson said.

Diversions were put in place with signs, traffic bulletins and social media updates shared to advise people to allow more time for their journeys and avoid the area.

They said the carriageway opened at about 06:30 on Saturday, with lane three remaining closed until the emergency repairs were completed on the safety barrier on Sunday evening.

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