Frustrated man fills potholes with rubber ducks to show how bad they are

By Joe Coughlan, Local Democracy Reporter

A resident has become so frustrated by the state of the roads in his area that he has resorted to filling potholes with rubber ducks and toy diggers to attract more attention to the issue.

Tim Webb, 66, of Orpington, Bromley said for the past four months, he has been reporting potholes to FixMyStreet which is a site used to flag road defects to local authorities.

After noticing that one pothole took “110 days to get fixed” he came up with a creative way to highlight the issue in his neighbourhood.

He began creating miniature scenes around potholes in the area, using props such as rubber ducks and toy construction vehicles gathered from friends, family and charity shops.

Speaking about the local authorities repair team, Mr Webb said: “God bless them, they’re rushed off their feet and can’t cope with the amount of jobs thrown at them.

“They claim it’s because of the cold weather and then they have rain. I have a feeling, and some people think, it’s years of underinvestment and not properly repairing roads.”

He added: “You’ve got to draw attention to it all. And I only go to the worst potholes, so I choose the best of the worst. I go there and have a look for myself and work out whether I think it’s worth doing a little visual story.

“I carry some water [in my car] in case there’s a pothole that needs filling with water, and the ducks obviously don’t want to be in a dry pothole.”

Mr Webb has stressed he does not want people to put themselves in danger by placing models in potholes or posing for pictures.

He said: “I wouldn’t want to encourage other people to do this because I don’t want them putting themselves at risk or causing accidents.”

The resident said he has often seen roads in the borough with up to four potholes present at a time.

He said that while the council’s teams prioritise the worst potholes, he sometimes sees teams leaving after only repairing the most severe hole in a group of several.

He added: “The other thing that tends to happen now is because there’s such a backlog, quite a number of the potholes end up as a temporary fix, and that temporary fix will then fail in a few weeks or a few months.”

Conservative Bromley councillor Nicholas Bennett said at a meeting on April 24 that the backlog of potholes to be repaired was scheduled to be completed by the end of May.

He said 13 teams were fixing about 70 potholes a day, and that the teams would continue to work through the summer once the backlog had been dealt with.

He said at the meeting: “We are trying our best. We are very embarrassed by it, who wouldn’t be? None of us wants to see our roads in this state, but this weird combination of weather we’ve had this year has simply exacerbated it across the country.

Bromley council was approached for comment but had not responded at the time of publication.

Pictured top: Tim Webb with his rubber ducks (Picture: Joe Coughlan)