Persistent wet weather and high volumes of holiday traffic have left MidCoast Council struggling to maintain the region's road network.
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Council's infrastructure and engineering services director Rob Scott says the combination of the two has caused widespread damage across the local government area.
"The two biggest enemies we've got from a road maintenance perspective are rain and traffic, and at the moment we've got both of them happening together in pretty high quantities," he said.
"You've got lots of visitors to the area, lots of vehicles out on roads, and that's translating with the addition of some rainfall to lots of potholes and lots of requests for service."
Mr Scott said council's main focus at the moment was to attend to the network's busiest roads.
"We're trying to keep up with the ones on our highest traffic and highest risk roads, which are generally the regional roads," he said.
"It means that a lot of local roads we just simply can't get to at this time of year, but we're certainly trying to keep up with what's happening on our main road network."
We really haven't had much of a break between storms.
- Rob Scott
Mr Scott said the problem had arisen at a difficult time of year, with council operating on a reduced staff over Christmas, but the return of the majority of the workforce would now see more roads attended to.
He also said council was reluctant to impose too many traffic delays over the holiday period.
"Particularly at Christmas time we don't want to be doing too much broad-scale road works, we only want to be responding to major problems at the moment, because the last thing we want to do is have traffic control out anywhere," he said.
Mr Scott said the consistent nature of the rainfall and storms since the beginning of December had made it hard to keep up with the damage.
"We really haven't had much of a break between storms," he said.
"I don't think we've had a Christmas period where there's been this sort of weather persistent all the way in the lead up and right through the Christmas period."
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Mr Scott said it would ultimately take a break in conditions for council to get on top of the issue, but with the Bureau of Meteorology predicting more wet weather over the coming months, he admitted it was unlikely to happen soon.
"At the moment it looks like we're going to continue to see storms rolling through the area, but hopefully we don't get some of the intensity we've had in previous storms because that does exacerbate the issue," he said.
In the meantime, Mr Scott urged motorists to exercise caution, particularly with additional holiday traffic around.
"One of the key messages we've got out for people is to drive to conditions and to be cautious when they're on the road," he said.
"It doesn't matter if they're on a highway and it's traffic they're being cautious of, or whether they're on a local road and it's about road conditions, you just never know what's around the next corner and people just need to take extra care with so many people on the road for Christmas."
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