Mitigation

I was at a meeting of A83 Task Force this morning .  It was set up a few years ago after one of the major landslips on the Rest & Be Thankful in order to involve the local community in decisions about the future of the road.

At its last meeting in January the Transport Minister Derek MacKay - who chairs the meetings - accepted that the principal of "continuous access" needed to be applied to the route and asked Transport Scotland to bring forward proposals that would  meet that objective.

Today's meeting considered those proposals and agreed that work should be taken forward to find ways of upgrading the Old Military Road, which is the fastest alternative when the Rest is closed but which presently takes time to open and has to operate by convoy.   More detailed plans will come back to the next Task Force later this year .

£43 million has been spent on the A83 since 2007 but the Scottish Government remains committed to doing more.   The mitigation actions have been largely successful but no one in the area believes they are the full solution as yet.  

That mitigation consists of a variety of measures including retaining nets. This is one of them, at  the lower end of the slope.  

There are trees behind this structure which is unusual as higher up the ground is denuded and difficult to plant given the thinness of the soil and the dangers from disturbing it.  

There was a small landslip at this spot some years ago but the most recent fall, in October last year, further up the hill  was very big and  technically beyond the design capability of the nets at that time.  However they did hold back most of the debris and large rocks, which allowed the carriageway to be cleared and re-opened much faster than it would have been had all the material reached the road.