YP Letters: Road closure on major route will cost the county millions

The military should have a greater role to play in assisting flood-hit communities.

IT is preposterous that North Yorkshire County Council can arbitrarily close the A59, the main arterial York to Lancashire road, due to a perceived possible danger to road users at Kex Gill Blubberhouses.

It is beyond belief that no danger existed from Christmas Day until January 5, but one emerged when the rain ceased.

We visited Austria two years ago following similar torrential rain causing severe flooding and landslides which had occurred two weeks prior to our visit. The terrain is much more severe than Kex Gill, but the roads we travelled on had either been cleared or temporarily reinstated to allow traffic movement.

In England we are faced with incompetent councils readily using “health and safety” as a scapegoat for their inaction. This closure will cost millions of pounds and there is apparently no urgency for dealing with the situation. The Royal Engineers would resolve this relatively minor problem within a week.

The comments from Skipton and Ripon MP Julian Smith that the closure may prove to cause considerable inconvenience, and that he fully supports NYCC, could not be more unhelpful.

He should be applying serious pressure to ensure this work is carried out as a matter of urgency. What happened to his party’s drive for a Northern Powerhouse when he is quite happy to sit back and see it split in two indefinitely?

From: ME Wright, Harrogate.

PREDICTABLY, several readers have blamed the North’s flooding on EU regulations. France and Germany have similar population sizes to ours, but their infrastructures each cover more than four times the area of the UK. So why do we neither see nor hear of, large scale inundation and crumbling bridges etc in these European countries?

Could it be that their administrators, both political and civil, are not so incestuously aligned with and obliged to, Paris and Berlin, as ours are to London and the Home Counties?

From: Chris Smith, Pontefract.

AS someone with what I consider to be a reasonable degree of common sense, I can’t help feeling totally frustrated at the rather pathetic approach both the local council and the Government are taking over  the replacement of Tadcaster Bridge.

Has no-one heard of the Royal Engineers or Bailey Bridges (Tom Richmond, The Yorkshire Post, January 9)?

Good grief, what is the country coming too?