Monmouthshire County Council gritted 55,000 miles of road – more than twice the distance round the world – during the longest period of extreme cold and snow for over thirty years.
The council were able to continue delivering key services to vulnerable people, open its comprehensive schools for external examinations and see less disruption to such services as waste collection than many other local authorities.
Although safety considerations mean that the refuse service is not quite back to normal, from Saturday 16th January the civic amenity sites will be open as usual.
From Monday 18th January normal collections to all areas will be restored, although there may still be a few areas they cannot reach. They will be seeking to reach as many households as they can and apologise if some waste or recycling is still not collected.
“Our key successes over the past four weeks of severe weather include:
- “Grit. We were able to keep a substantial proportion of the county’s 900 miles of roads passable to traffic in 160 gritting runs of 340 miles each throughout the four week spell of cold and snowy weather. We started with a full stock (7500 tonnes) of road salt and although we have little left, our conservation measures have been effective enough to ensure that we can salt roads as required for the next few days. Our stocks have been supplemented by our purchase of a large supply of table salt. Mixed with sand, it makes an effective substitute for road salt. We were also able to clear major police stations, the Royal Gwent Hospital, St Woolas Hospital, County Hospital and Talygarn, Llanfrechfa hospital, St Cadocs hospital, Blaina hospital and Blaenavon hospital.
- “Social Services. As well as using 4×4 vehicles to ensure that we were able to deliver home care services every day of the cold weather and Community Meals most days, we also undertook the mammoth task of contacting every vulnerable person that we know of in Monmouthshire. This was to make sure that they were warm, safe, had sufficient food supplies and were aware of the services that they could access.
- “One Stop Shops and County Hall. Our One Stop Shops and County Hall remained open every working day. Our ‘agile working’ policy ensured that staff that could not make it to the office were able to work from home or from a council office nearer to where they live.
- “Refuse. Although for safety reasons we were unable to collect refuse for four days, we are proud that we kept non collections to a minimum and are now beginning to catch up with waste collections.
- “Schools for exams. Although most of our schools closed at some point during the period of bad weather, we made a special effort to ensure that our four comprehensive schools were open for pupils taking external examinations. We have since cleared snow from the remainder of the county’s schools.
- “Service updates on web and to key media. Our web site was kept up to date with service information as soon as we were aware of changes. Schools information was updated from as early as 5am and as late as midnight. For the first time this year, we used Twitter to keep residents up to date with service levels, with council staff Tweeting updates on a 24/7 basis.
- “We also cleared roads to allow emergency medical supplies to be delivered to Monmouthshire residents and to help one of our citizens gain access to the dialysis treatment.”
The council’s work over the period has attracted thanks and praise from the First Minister, Carwyn Jones AM, Health Secretary Edwina Hart AM, David Davis MP, Monmouthshire Housing Association, local health facilities and day centres and from followers on the council’s Twitter.
