Potholes could be repaired in 8 minutes
The move comes after years of complaints about road conditions in the region.
Potholes on Dumfries and Galloway’s roads could soon be fixed in a matter of minutes with the long-awaited introduction of a hi-tech machine.
The JCB Pothole Pro is to be trialled in this region over a six-month period, with the machine set to be put into action within the next couple of weeks.
The award-winning road maintenance machinery is much quicker than the usual pothole filling process – completing a standard repair in just eight minutes.
Dumfries and Galloway Council chiefs this week confirmed they are bringing in the expensive piece of equipment to get to work on the region’s pothole-riddled roads.
Castle Douglas and Crocketford Councillor first suggested drafting in the JCB Pothole Pro several years ago, and raised the matter again at Tuesday’s economy and infrastructure committee.
She said: “It was two years ago or so that I had investigated the JCB pothole repair equipment, which seems to be very effective and is working extremely well in other areas of the UK.
“Can I just have confirmation that we’ll just be trialling that — not buying it at the moment, but trialling it?”
Karen Brownlie, the council’s assistant director of transport and infrastructure, replied: “We are hiring that machine for a trial period of six months this year.
“The team are currently being trained to utilise that, and we hope that it will be in situ in the region within the next couple of weeks.
“We will provide members with an update later.”
The JCB Pothole Pro is an award-winning three-in-one road maintenance machine that’s specially designed to fix potholes from start to finish.
It mechanises the entire preparation process — cutting, cropping, and cleaning — into a single pass, allowing a single operator to complete a standard repair in less than 10 minutes.
The news will be welcomed by residents across a region where the state of the roads has been a long-running source of frustration.
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Potholes consistently rank among the top complaints in customer satisfaction surveys.
The JCB Pothole Pro has already proved its worth elsewhere. When Stoke-on-Trent City Council became the first local authority to use it back in 2021, it repaired an area equivalent to eight Olympic-sized swimming pools in just 130 days — work that would normally have taken 1,040 days.
The machine operates at around eight times the speed of traditional pothole repair methods. Usually a team of workers must excavate and clean the area around a pothole using con saws, jackhammers, pickaxes and spades — a process taking around 50 minutes per repair.
The Pothole Pro cuts that to around eight minutes per fix using three specialist attachments.
The six-month trial will allow the council to assess whether purchasing the machine — which costs between £165,000 and £184,000 — would represent good value for money going forward.
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