wri t es Simon says
by Simon Hastelow
Walk the Route
This is a long standing piece of advice for anyone venturing off-road in an unfamiliar area or driving a new trail - when the terrain looks uncertain or there are obstacles in the way, walk the route!
We’ve all seen people get bogged down, gone deeper into the water than they could safely handle, or got stranded on unseen rocks, tree stumps or other obstacles.
There are two very good indicators that a hazard may be lying ahead: • One is that there is more churned up dirt than anywhere else, lots of footprints and tyre tracks at unusual angles. • The second is that there’s normally someone standing there with a camera to record your exploits and failures for posterity! I had two instances of this recently that prove waking the route yourself is a good policy, even when you’re not off-road. We experienced a brief period of higher than average rainfall and
the usual roads got flooded, just as they always do, regardless of the efforts of the local authority and water company to minimise the flooding. It seems that they may have decided that as long as most of the roads are OK most of the time, then that’s all they need to do. The odd times when roads become unpassable or properties get flooded is justifiable on their cost/benefit analysis spreadsheets. However there is one particular road in my town that ALWAYS floods, and ALWAYS gets mentioned in the local paper accompanied by the inevitable photo of a stranded motorist roughly halfway into the flooded section. It is easy to blame the utility companies and infrastructure failures of the local council, but just like it’s not really worth maintaining an entire fleet of snow ploughs just for the half a dozen days of deep snow we get every few years, its probably not worth spending millions on fixing this particular road - an underpass next to the train station - and subject us all to the inevitable months of traffic disruption, just to mitigate the few days its floods each year.
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