The second phase of work to resolve a number of landslip issues along the A488 Hope Valley is being carried out from June 30 to August 22.
This video shows the scale of the work so far – with local councillor and council leader Heather Kidd also visiting the site to see and find out more about the work.
00:30I'm Councillor Heather Kidd, the Councillor for Cherbury and Worthen. I'm in the Hope Valley on the A488, where we have four major land slips and a fifth one.
00:39And I'm hoping now that this will be the end of it and no more traffic lights.
00:47Hi, I'm Ian McClellan, I'm the General Manager for Shropshire Highways.
00:50And today I'm here in A488 at Hope Valley, dealing with major projects for repairing four slips that are slipping from me.
00:58The side of the roads are slipping into the nearby river.
01:01These schemes individually aren't overly complex, but the complexity is the location, the remoteness, and it's a site of specific scientific interest.
01:11And it's all to do with the rock strata. So we've had to work with geologists and we've had to work with Natural England and deliver the solution.
01:17One, going to last, but two, is going to meet the requirements of Natural England and protecting the status here of the SSI.
01:24The rock armour here, it's a way of stabilising the slope.
01:27So you have large rock as a footer and that provides a stability and then from that we can then build up layers of rock that will give that stability on this section.
01:37Each of the rocks here on the rock armour solution, the larger ones, which are about a metre by metre square, is approximately two tonnes each.
01:43Getting them into site and to location was a real challenge.
01:47We've had to bring specialist equipment in, have BT cables moved, and that thankfully has been successful.
01:53And we've got a good base in now to make sure that we provide a solution that's going to last and keep this road very stable for years to come.
02:04Other sections are what we call gabion baskets.
02:07We do a concrete base and then we put baskets full of rock as we go up to give that stability on the other three slopes.
02:13This is amazing the amount of work here and until you're actually on site and standing at the bottom, you don't realise how technical it is, how deep it is and so on.
02:28I'm really impressed with the amount of work that's going on and I'm looking forward to it being open by the time the schools go back.
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