The roadworks on Portland Beach Road are on schedule for completion in the next five to six weeks, Scottish and Southern Energy (SSEN) has said.

Work started on the A354 in the middle of January as part of a new electricity cable replacement project and started in the area of Hamm Beach Road before moving towards Wyke Regis.

Work also took place on Langton Avenue, Marlborough Avenue and South Road.

The bulk of the work, which sees teams installing the ducting which will house the new cable, will be completed in the next three weeks.

After that, teams will start installing the cable itself, which is expected to take two weeks to complete.

Although the work will be in the public highway, this part of the project will only require very small excavations of approximately two metres in length at intervals of 500 metres, allowing engineers to put the cable into the ducting in one excavation and then pull it through to the next.

Due to the project, there have been delays, with traffic out of Portland tailing as far back as The Heights Hotel in the mornings.

In the evenings, tailbacks to get onto the island can go as far back as the Granby Industrial Estate, with motorists experiencing delays of up to 45 minutes per journey.

One Portland resident said: “I am feeling utter frustration.

“The last three days have been really bad again and I have been hitting tailbacks at The Heights Hotel, with traffic just stopping.

“There are days when traffic is good and you can drive without any relative delay, but there are other times when it is really bad.”

A spokesman from SSEN said: “We are committed to doing everything we can to minimise disruption to the local community and we will continue to monitor traffic flows on a daily basis.

“Our traffic lights are manned every day (including weekends) from 7am until 7pm and this allows us to manually control the lights to ensure that delays to drivers are kept to a minimum.”

Travel Dorset has asked those who are using side-streets such as Stoke Road to avoid the queues, to stop, with Merley Road and Dumbarton Road currently closed.

Once phase one of the project is complete, there will be a break for the summer so as not to disturb nesting wildlife along Chesil Beach, before workers return in September to remove the old cable that runs alongside Chesil Beach.

SSEN have previously said that this work will not disrupt traffic, as the cable will be taken from the back of the Fine Foundation Chesil Beach Centre.

The project has cost approximately £2.6 million and has seen the replacement of seven kilometres of the electricity cable which supplies Portland.

Miles Crossley, SSEN project manager said: “We would like to thank the local community for their patience and understanding as our teams go about their work. “This project is an essential part of our commitment to providing a safe and secure supply of electricity and, when completed, will make the local network more robust and resilient and minimise the risk of power cuts for years to come.”