A major £134 million road in Leicestershire could open within weeks despite persistent rain and flooding.
The North and East Melton Mowbray Distributor Road (MMDR) is set to open this spring, with around 12 weeks of work remaining.
However, bosses have said that recent weather has caused delays as they put the finishing touches on the road.
Work on some areas of the road has come to a standstill due to persistent rain across the county.
The county has been hit with flood warnings over the past week, with heavy downpours hardly slowing down, and project managers say the 10-year build has faced constant weather-related issues.
Dave Collis, project delivery manager at Leicestershire County Council, said that the main priorities for completion were footpaths and other small cycling paths, but due to “non-stop” rain, it’s been hard to finish them.
He added: “There’s no point in digging while it’s raining. It’s a lot of the footpaths that need finishing.
“When we lay the tarmac and try to sit it on paths right now, it’ll just ruin it. In an ideal world, we would have got to it in January”.
He said that the project would have been completed “a lot earlier”, but constant rainfall throughout the end of this year and last year has hampered parts of the project.
He added: “We started on-site in May 2023, and late in 2023 I believe we had some of the wettest days in the Midlands since records began.
“One of the first winters we were here was one of the worst winters on record. We’ve now had one of the wettest Januaries in years. So we’ve been unlucky with the weather, and it’s stopped us doing a lot of work, whereas if we had a normal winter, we would have been tidying things up by now”.
The new road has been a decade in the making, starting in December 2017, with more than 160 construction staff on site every day and a whopping £134m just to get it built.
The MMDR is set to divert traffic from the Melton town centre and accommodate the extra vehicles resulting from housing developments in the area. Over the past few years, work has also included a number of disruptions for drivers around Melton to allow the route and the roundabouts and bridges scattered along it to be constructed.
The 7.1km stretch of road, which goes around the north and east of Melton – past the River Eye and next to Twinlakes Park – is the largest the council has ever undertaken and will unlock land for new businesses and around 4,500 homes.
The plan also included rediverting the River Eye back to its natural course, large archaeological digs, and the construction of a new 48-metre-long rail bridge over the Birmingham to Peterborough line at Lag Lane.
Janna Walker, assistant director for development and growth, highways and transport, at Leicestershire County Council, did admit that there were “challenges” faced along the way while building the road.
She said: “We are really excited to be nearly there. We’re just waiting for the weather to cheer up a bit so we can finish the scheme off.
“It’s a massive challenge. It’s the biggest scheme that Leicestershire County Council has ever delivered.
“We’re waiting on an opening date to do with the water, but we’ve got around 12 weeks’ worth of work to go”.
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