At two recent meetings of the council’s South East Area Committee, councillors dug into the issue.
“There’s a huge amount of our footpaths and our roads that are left in ribbons by really shoddy workmanship,” Social Democrats Councillor Tara Deacy said.
“Like, I don’t know how we can kind of stand over that type of work,” Deacy told council staff at a meeting of the South East Area Committee in March.
Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey flagged a stretch of tarmac patching a hole that had been dug in cobbled Castle Street between City Hall and Dublin Castle. “If you can’t get a place like that right, it just looks fairly terrible.”
Fine Gael Councillor Danny Byrne, at the April meeting of the same committee, echoed the concerns again. “It’s quite embarrassing, like so much so that a local residents’ organization had, like, a competition to spot the worst blob.”
All over the city, week in week out, companies dig up the streets to fix water main breaks, power outages and gas leaks. Many of these are then temporarily patched with tarmac.
And all over the city, residents complain that these works look rubbish, and that these patches can be uneven, tripping people up or forcing cyclists to swerve.
At meetings of their committee in March and April, councillors for the South East Area dug into the issue, to try to find a way to make the streets look better, and to make them safer to walk on.
At the March meeting, the impression given by council officials seemed to be that Irish Water workers were behind many of the blobs.
But in the April meeting, councillors learnt that some of the blame lies much closer to home.
Council workers lay down many of the tarmac blobs that councillors were complaining about, they learnt. Dublin City Council Director of Services Karl Mitchell said there was room for improvement by the council.
“When we go and there’s a burst, sometimes that temporary reinstatement is not as – it’s poor, because it’s just a quick fix, but it’s poor,” Mitchell said. “So I think there’s a piece of work we probably need to do to get a temporary reinstatement better.”
There are also changes afoot that might push Irish Water and ESB, whose repairs and upgrades account for 60 percent of the holes dug in the city’s streets and footpaths, to get the tarmac blobs replaced with permanently finished surfaces faster.
When there’s a water main leak, or a power outage, or a gas leak, Irish Water, or ESB, or Gas Networks Ireland gets called on to sort the issue.
“The majority of openings are caused by reactive calls,” said senior executive engineer Deri Flood, at the March council meeting. “So they just have to go out and fix these things. And if they don’t fix them, that is a big problem for the public in general.”
“You have to dig trenches, you have to dig holes,” she said. To do this, they have to apply for “road opening” licences. So they dig the hole, fix the problem, fill it in, and put a tarmac patch on top.
There are about 30,000 holes dug in the roads and footpaths of the city each year, Flood said.
About 40 percent of these are dug by Irish Water, 20 percent by ESB, 12 percent by Gas Networks Ireland, “and the remainder are divvied up between internal utilities within ourselves and the telcos”, she said.
Councillors at that March meeting were critical of the work done temporarily closing up the holes.
But Flood said that “tarmacadam or blacktop is an acceptable form of temporary reinstatement. It’s unsightly but it is an acceptable form of temporary reinstatement.”
A spokesperson for Irish Water said it tries to avoid digging up roads and when it has to, it “aims to complete permanent reinstatement … straight away, and to avoid the need for temporary reinstatement”.
“Unfortunately with regard to operational activity due to the need to carry out emergency repairs to the water network to ensure continuity of supply it is not always/usually possible to permanently reinstate a footpath or road immediately after a repair,” they said.
So, a temporary patch is needed. These are supposed to meet certain standards, but council staff don’t actually go out to look at all of them to make sure that they do, Flood said.
“Now if we only had 1,000 a year we would see them all, but because there’s 30,000 a year and there’s only nine officers looking at them, you can’t expect us to be at every single opening and see how they’re all going,” she said
They respond to complaints about bad patches, though, and “we are patrolling around” and seeing some others too, she said.
At the March meeting, some councillors seemed to come away with the idea that it was the utility companies, and mostly Irish Water and ESB, that were primarily responsible for the messy blobs.
“Irish Water are the main culprits, it sounds like, they are the key culprits,” Fine Gael Councillor James Geoghegan said at the March meeting.
But an Irish Water spokesperson, asked by email about that after the March meeting, said it was actually council staff who temporarily patched up the holes for them.
“Temporary reinstatements in the DCC [Dublin City Council] area are completed by DCC water services crews under a Service Level Agreement with Uisce Éireann [Irish Water],” the spokesperson said.
At the April meeting, Geoghegan asked Flood, the senior executive engineer, about that statement. “That statement is correct for the asset operations, but all of those staff … they are agents of Irish Water, so they are carrying out work on behalf of Irish Water,” she said.
Green Party Councillor Claire Byrne asked Flood to repeat that. “So, we’ve gone a very long way around … and it turns out the temporary reinstatements are done by Dublin City Council, right? Is that correct?”
“Yes, so they’re Dublin City Council staff on behalf of Irish Water,” Flood said.
So it’s council workers who do the work, but Irish Water that is responsible for it, according to Flood.
If a water main bursts, and council staff dig a hole and fix it and put down a tarmac blob to patch it temporarily, and if that blob is uneven and someone trips and falls and hurts herself, it’s Irish Water that’s on the hook for any payout, Flood said.
Still, said Mitchell, the director of services, “we’re going to do some more, I think ourselves, around that the temporary fix is fit for purpose”.
A temporary patch isn’t the end of the process – or, at least, it’s not supposed to be.
When a company gets a “road opening” licence, a license to dig a hole in the street, it requires them to permanently reinstate the footpath or road, not just with a tarmac patch, but properly.
“And they do – in time,” Flood said. The problem is the “in time” bit. The temporary patches can stay much longer than they are supposed to, she said.
And those temporary patches, since they were only meant to be temporary, can get more uneven and unsightly as time passes, said Mitchell.
“The issue sometimes … might be the time lag between the temporary and a full reinstatement,” he said. “The lag it makes it worse subsidence and everything else happens.”
Reasons vary for the time lag between the temporary patch and the final fixing of the road with a permanent reinstatement, the Irish Water spokesperson said.
“On busy roads and junctions the priority is to get the road re-opened as quickly as possible post a repair, to minimise disruption to the general public,” they said. So they put down a temporary patch and then wait for a better moment to do the permanent one, which takes much longer, they said.
That better moment can be a while. “In the winter period concrete does not set correctly and is prone to cracking at temperatures below 5°C, preventing an immediate permanent reinstatement, until weather conditions improve,” the spokesperson said.
Unlike the temporary patches, the permanent reinstatements are done for Irish Water by contractor GMC, not Dublin City Council, Flood said.
Even in cases where the temporary patch is poor, and there’s no good reason not to get GMC in to put the road or footpath back together permanently, there’s not much the council can do at the moment – especially when it comes to Irish Water and ESB.
The council doesn’t have the authority to order the companies that dug the holes to get moving and sort things out quicker, Flood said.
However, there’s a national “deposit scheme” in place, a system of monitoring how many holes each company has dug in streets and footpaths across the country, and how many of those they’ve permanently, properly closed up.
If they have too many holes, and not enough have been permanently reinstated, then they could be asked to pay more money as a deposit.
“Under the national deposit scheme, the number of openings is monitored as well as compliance with the procedures of the licenses to determine what level of deposit would be appropriate for that utility,” a spokesperson for Irish Water said.
But even that lever is not available to pull when it comes to Irish Water and ESB, which together are responsible for most of the holes in the city’s streets and footpaths.
Their work in the Dublin City Council area still goes through an older council system for tracking road openings and closures – and not through the national system, called the Map Roads Licensing (MRL) Scheme.
“The reason they’re not on the system is that we need to get them to sort out the legacy items with us in Dublin City Council,” Flood said. The council press office did not respond directly to a query on what those “legacy items” are.
Irish Water and ESB are due to be put onto the Map Roads system between “the start of June 23 until 24”, Flood said.
The spokesperson for Irish Water said it “will support any migration to MRL when requested to do so by DCC”. The company is already using the system for “openings for all capital projects and new connections works nationally, outside of the DCC area”.
“The inclusion of Irish Water on MRL should result in a significant reduction in the number of temporary reinstatements on the DCC road network,” according to a report Flood presented at the April meeting.
Once that shift has happened, the council’s Roads Management Office will be watching and each month reporting to utilities on their progress, Flood said.
“You should have X number of openings and now you have X plus Y number of openings. That means you’re gonna have to have more money in your deposit,” she said. And that will “hit them where it hurts in terms of money”, she said.
At both the March and April meetings, Labour Councillor Mary Freehill sought to highlight a pilot project she, as chair of a working group of councillors advocating for older people, has been trying to push forward.
It was meant to try to improve the system for inspecting and reinstating roads and footpaths after they’d been dug up for utility companies, to make sure they were safe for older people walking around – to make sure people wouldn’t trip and fall.
“I got agreement for the pilot scheme, in Harold’s Cross, where we look at how this is done, which was an opportunity to highlight what we need to have done and the powers that our local authority needs to have to deal with the standards of openings and the standards of reinstatement,” she said.
But, at the two meetings, Freehill said she felt there was resistance within the council to implementing the pilot, which was to target areas in Harold’s Cross and Glasnevin. “I just find that we’re being sent around in circles,” she said.
Indeed, Flood, the council engineer, did not seem on board with the pilot project.
“You’re looking for a pilot of a procedure to improve utility reinstatements. There is a procedure in place for utility reinstatements,” she told Freehill.
“I agree it’s not working,” Flood said. “They’re not coming back quickly enough to permanent reinstatements … there is just such a huge volume of them coming through the whole time that there is a large number outstanding.”
“I cannot see what a pilot is going to achieve in relation to this,” she said.
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