Monmouthshire County Council has decided to prioritise efforts on keeping the County’s four comprehensive schools open on Wednesday (13th January). This is to allow students to continue to take their examinations. Further snow is expected later today, continuing into tomorrow. Monmouthshire County Council is fully prepared to deliver key services to the best of our ability.
In addition to our roads and highways crews, we will have 50 people starting work at 5am. Once they have helped clear the entrances to the comprehensive schools. They will move onto town centres, car parks as well as hospitals, police stations, fire stations, ambulance stations, GP surgeries and sheltered accommodation. They will then start to help primary schools.
The key areas of activity are as follows:
Road Salting
Stocks of road salt in Monmouthshire are obviously declining, with little prospect of new stocks arriving before the end of this week. We are confident, however, that we have enough road salt to see us through to the thaw that is expected at the end of the week. This is a compliment to our preparation and deployment over the course of several weeks. Some of our neighbouring authorities are now on bare minimum stocks. We cannot allow the public in our surrounding areas to be put at risk of having untreated primary routes, so if we need to help through letting them access some of our stock at Llanfoist we will do so. We have been re-stocking all of our grit bins regularly and will aim to continue to do so.
We started gritting at 2pm today in preparation for the forecast snow. Once the snow starts to fall, we will begin snow plough operations, followed up with further road salting.
Schools
We are doing our best to keep the county’s comprehensive schools open. The decision to close a school is taken by the head teacher. School closures will be listed on our web site (www.monmouthshire.gov.uk) as soon as we are informed of them. We also have a telephone information line, giving pre-recorded updates on closures (01633 64 4995).
Social Care and Community Meals
We have decided to contact every vulnerable person known to us to check that they are okay and offer advice. This is far more than any other local authority in Wales is doing, but we believe it is the right thing to do.
We hope to run our Community Meals service tomorrow and will continue to use our Countryside Service’s 4×4 vehicles to try and make that possible. Weather permitting, we hope to continue to run our Home Care service and open our day centres. If there is a problem with this, we will contact service users direct.
Other Council Services
We are planning to open all our One Stop Shops tomorrow. We are also planning to open County Hall. The decision to open libraries, leisure centres and museums will be made on a local basis, depending on weather conditions.
Our refuse and recycling service is in its second full day of operation. If possible, we will operate as normal tomorrow. But that will be dependent on conditions. There will be a recorded message on 01633 644005 from 08:00 hours to let the public know if it is running. We will also be updating our web site.
