9:54am Monday 7th December 2009
By Dan Goater
FURIOUS traders in Weymouth claim they lost thousands of pounds worth of custom after Wessex Water closed a main road to deal with a burst main.
Traffic was diverted away from Littlemoor Road at its junctions with Dorchester Road and Preston Road after a water main near the railway bridge burst yesterday morning.
Engineers set up temporary traffic lights while they worked to fix the problem.
Shop owners in the Littlemoor precinct said the diversions cost them thousands of pounds in passing trade on what should have been one of their busiest pre-Christmas weekends.
Brian Hayter, who owns Littlemoor Hardware, said local shop owners were fed up with the delays and disruptions caused by Wessex Water’s ongoing works in the area.
He said: “We’ve put up with four and half months of them digging up and closing roads and we’ve put up with it because it’s supposed to be for the greater good of the area.
“They said this work was going to stop things like burst water mains from happening but it hasn’t so far.
“They also said that this work was going to take no more than three and a half months but we’re already a month past that with no sign of it stopping soon.”
He added: “This should be one of our busiest weekends before Christmas but the car park is only half as full as it should be.
“I must have lost a good couple of hundred pounds of trade.”
Somerfield’s trading manager Ginny Marshallsay believes her store lost around £6,000-worth of trade yesterday because of traffic diversions.
She said: “The place is absolutely dead compared to how it normally is. I can’t understand why Wessex Water has diverted traffic at both ends of the road.
“They should put notices up telling people they can still get to the shopping centre.”
The director of Gould’s Garden Centre in Littlemoor, Anthony Gould, added: “The trouble for us is that this should have been one of the best trading weekends of the year, with people coming in to buy trees and decorations.
“I estimate I’ve lost up to 25 per cent of my normal customers this weekend and that’s at least three or four thousands pounds worth of lost trade.”
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