Digging into the cause of cracks

17 June 2009

Mysterious cracks have appeared in the newest stretch of Greater Manchester’s motorway ring road, less than a decade after it opened.

Now, six miles of the £220M ‘missing link’ section of the M60 is to close for the next six weekends while Highways Agency engineers try to find the cause.

The engineers will dig a trench across the entire carriageway in an attempt to find the cause of tiny cracks, which have been appearing in the HMD15 bitumen.

Matthew Sweeting, Highways Agency operations manager for the area told Surveyor: ‘We don’t know why the cracks have started appearing. They are small and pose no danger to drivers and, until now, we have been fixing them as they appear.

‘But they shouldn’t be there so early in the life of the motorway, and it has got to the stage where we decided to have a full investigation.’

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