DRIVERS face queues of up two and a half miles coming out of Wilmslow, town councillor Frank McCarthy said this week.

Cllr McCarthy was speaking at Monday’s town council meeting after hearing news of the planned reopening date for the airport tunnel on the A538 and completion of major junction works.

Wendy Sinfield, community relations manager for Manchester Airport, told the meeting the tunnel, which had closed following a fire, was due to reopen on Wednesday, November 15.

She added that work on widening the junction near the Amazon and DHL warehouses was anticipated to be completed by the early part of next year.

“I think we would all be grateful for this to be done as soon as possible,” said Cllr McCarthy.

“Coming out of Wilmslow the queues start from the town, and the other day I measured them at two and a half miles. Getting out of Wilmslow is becoming chronic.”

Wendy said work on reopening the tunnel had been delayed because soot had lined the inside of the tunnel where the fire was.

She said: “The paint wouldn’t adhere to it, so they had to spend quite a lot of time cleaning that off before they could paint it, and there was also a problem with the controllers for the lighting.”

In respect of the junction work, she said: “That was always planned to happen when the site was built.

“But when the site was built we didn’t anticipate Amazon with all those people coming so quickly.

“So unfortunately, what that meant was that the widening of the junction had to happen more quickly than we anticipated.”

Cllr Viveene Brooks said: “In the summer people were going mad because Wilmslow was virtually cut off because there was stuff on the bypass, on Styal Road and in the town.

“A lot of people said whichever way you tried to go you couldn’t get out of Wilmslow.

“Everything was happening at the same time – do companies not liaise with each other to stop that happening?”

A representative from Electricity North West, who updated councillors on work being undertaken to replace underground power cables, said there had been no forward planning because of the urgency of the work.