Pothole Claim

tim9966

What's the best way to claim for pothole damage and am I likely to be successfully?

I've already emailed the council customer services who said it wasn't their problem. 

I hit a pot hole on a country road tonight shattering the alloy wheel and causing a full tyre blow out. 

Within 5 minutes Council contractors arrived to repair the damage and they had taken a photo of it before they filled it in and let me take a photo of their phone. They said it had been reported today as an urgent case. 

It's going to cost about £400 for a new alloy wheel, then about £150 for a new tyre. I'll need 2 now as they need to be replaced in pairs, then then I'll need to have to wheels balanced, so it's going to come to about £750. 

 

Ectophile

1. You put in a claim to the council.
2. Council says "no". They always will reject every claim.
3. You then have to show that either (a) they never inspect their roads, or (b) they don't fill in potholes within a reasonable time.

It can't be (a) if there's a box painted around the hole, and the pothole fillers turning up minutes after you hit the hole suggests (b) doesn't apply either.

Sounds like an insurance claim.

facade

As Ectophile says, the Council aren't negligent because they urgently repaired it, and you were unfortunate to drive over it 5 minutes too early.

Either pay yourself, or submit an insurance claim for the "accident" which will go down as "at fault" (since the Council won't pay out) and affect your NCB and future premium.

(Of course you should report the accident to your insurer anyway, even if you are not claiming....)

Mr.Generous

Damage to the wheel is amazing, never realised that could happen - not seen anything like it. We tried to get a claim for a tyre from a pothole puncture a few years ago and also failed, sorry.

As an afterthought a spare wheel beats a can of foam on these occasions I guess.

sevenhills

The pothole is at the edge of the road, but the road does look narrow. Should a vehicle be so close to the edge of the road, would that affect a claim?

But it does look like the pothole has been repaired before. I guess you didn't measure the depth of the hole.

facade

Mr.Generous said:

Damage to the wheel is amazing, never realised that could happen - not seen anything like it. We tried to get a claim for a tyre from a pothole puncture a few years ago and also failed, sorry.

As an afterthought a spare wheel beats a can of foam on these occasions I guess.

I've seen BMW wheels do that, they aren't really fit for purpose (driving along the rutted potholed cart tracks that councils call "roads" nowadays).

I'd be gutted if a tiny hole like that smashed one of my wheels too!

Ectophile

Mr.Generous said:

Damage to the wheel is amazing, never realised that could happen - not seen anything like it. We tried to get a claim for a tyre from a pothole puncture a few years ago and also failed, sorry.

As an afterthought a spare wheel beats a can of foam on these occasions I guess.

It's from having low profile tyres on alloy wheels.  The tyres don't have as much give as the old fashioned ones.

tim9966

It had been filled it by the time I'd walked back to the pothole, but the council workers said they had all the details for it and it would all be on the system.

The road was fairly narrow, but not single track. It doesn't have any white lines down the middle as it's too narrow for that and for 2 cars to pass they both have to pull over as far as possible and go slowly. Although the road is covered by the national 60 mph speed limit you can't really ever go above 40 mph on it. 

Looking at the wheel today it looks like the tyre itself is undamaged, but it's just the tyre keeping the wheel together. I did have a spare spacesaver wheel as this is a case that a bottle of tyre weld would have been completely useless. 

I've been driving along this road for the past 20 years.

DullGreyGuy

To sue the council you have to show they were negligent, in this particular scenario it means one of two things:

1) They have failed to inspect the road inline with their policy
2) They have been made aware of the issue (either via their own inspection or a report from a member of the public) and have failed to fix it within a reasonable timeframe, normally as defined in their policy

Its very much a case of them being measured by their own yard stick!

It sounds like it was reported and fixed within 24 hours and no council is going to have a policy that requires them to act faster than that. You could follow the process to ask about inspections/reports to see if there were earlier reports and/or they missed the last scheduled inspection but dont get your hopes up too much, most councils' policies aren't great and it gives them a lot of leeway hence many claims fail. 

Bigphil1474

OP, worth remembering that councils don't have the budgets to fix all the roads, nor the information to know where every pothole is, so the most they can do is have policies that give them enough leeway so they don't have to pay out when someone's car does get damaged (unless they haven't followed their own policy). It does mean that those individuals who are affected end up paying out of their own pocket, but the majority who aren't, don't.