A WAR of words has broken out between Somerset County Council and Wessex Water after workmen dug up a £100,000 new road surface in Wellington.

Town councillor Marcus Barr prompted a county council inquiry into the matter after he complained in September about North Street being dug up to lay a water pipe connection just days after resurfacing work was finished.

The county council laid the blame firmly at the door of the utility company, saying it was told in advance of the planned resurfacing of North Street and Waterloo Road and was asked to carry out its work beforehand.

County cabinet member for highways Cllr David Fothergill said a legal notice had been placed on North Street to protect it from unnecessary road works for three years.

But Cllr Fothergill said service connections such as the water pipe for a house in North Street could only be stopped for the first 21 days as it would be unreasonable to prevent properties having water, gas or electricity.

Cllr Fothergill said: “All ‘statutory undertakers’ were made aware this site was about to have a Section 58 Notice placed on it, but, for reasons unknown to the highway authority, Wessex Water chose not to excavate for the service connection prior to the surfacing works taking place.”

But Wessex Water spokesman George Keast told the WWN this week he had ‘no record or evidence that anyone from the council spoke to us’ about the resurfacing.

Mr Keast said although a householder request for a service connection was made some months earlier, an application to highways was not officially made until September 14 – two weeks after the resurfacing work.

Now, Wessex Water operations director James Rider has written to Cllr Fothergill asking for evidence the company was told about the resurfacing work.

Cllr Barr said: “The bottom line here is that council taxpayers saw a lot of their money used to resurface a road only for it to start being dug up again within days.

“This is wrong, and between them the county council and Wessex Water have to make sure this kind of thing cannot happen again.

“To my mind, Wessex Water knew months ago they were likely to have to do this work and so there should have been some kind of communication with the council, even if the formal application was not made until afterwards.

“The only saving grace is that Wessex Water made a reasonably good job of patching up the road compared to some jobs I have seen.”