Poor road sealing and drainage is causing potholes to appear almost everywhere says the Fiji Roads Authority.

Change Manager Mike Rudge says it is critical to seal the surface of the road so that water runs off it and onto the drainage along the road.

Rugde says the problem with Fiji is that the sealing and drainage are not good.
Water sits in the pavement and when trucks run over it, potholes appear

Potholes will pretty much appear overnight if roads are not sealed -if it rains and you hit trucks on it and that’s what we see now. I think this weekend in Suva it was very wet on Saturday night. SOme roads in Suva – the next day there were potholes a foot in diameter because the roads no longer are water-proof. If it’s water-proof then there should not be any problem. A seal lasts about 10 to 12 years in normal condition. It breaks down basically under a combination of sunlight – which make its so brittle and the traffic load.

Rudge says there hasn’t been any re-sealing or re-surfacing of Fiji’s roads in the last 10 to 15 years.

I think what we need to do is recognise that seals have a limited life and make sure that we have programs to re-seal every 10 to 12 years.

From January 2013 – works on re-sealing and re-surfacing 40 kilometers of our road will commence.