Fears of road gridlock were raised yesterday after The Argus published a list of 20 separate sets of roadworks in Brighton and Hove due to take place at the same time.

The work is part of a major scheme by Southern Water to replace all the Victorian sewers in the city. Katya Mira spoke to project manager Bob Lennard, who said they had no choice but to dig up the roads.

Fuming motorists held up by the replacement of Brighton and Hove's antiquated water mains have been spitting at workmen and shouting abuse at them.

Bob Lennard, the project manager, revealed yesterday what the men are having to put up with.

He said: "I appreciate it is frustrating for drivers. Being stuck in traffic can be infuriating and I can empathise.

"We are doing all we can to minimise the impact but sometimes there is no way round it."

The latest chapter of a £15.5 million programme to update the city's antiquated water mains system began this week.

The three-year scheme was first started last January and involves digging up almost 90 miles of road and pathway and replacing the outmoded cast iron pipes.

More than 30 miles of pipes have already been replaced but now work has reached the most central areas of the city.

Roadworks at the junction of King's Road and Grand Junction Road - a stretch of the busy seafront road between the Grand hotel and Palace Pier - will carry on until August while work in nearby West Street is going on until April. Work in Chatham Place and New England Street, also in the city centre, is due to begin on Monday.

Motorists, pedestrians and even bus company boss Roger French share concerns about the potential chaos the work will cause and question whether it all needs to be done at the same time.

But Mr Lennard said the replacement of the pipes was well overdue and the work was a necessity.

Considering they were more than 160 years old and that cast iron was supposed to have a life of 50 years they had already survived more than three times as long as expected.

If left any longer they would leak and the risk of bursting would increase, he added.

He said: "Those pipes have done us proud but it is time we did something with them.

"The last thing anyone wants on a nice sunny day on the seafront is for a water pipe to explode.

"The longer we leave the pipes as they are the more chance that will happen. This area is the oldest part of the Brighton network.

"Also these days it is becoming more and more important to protect our environment which means protecting water as a scarce resource and minimising any leakage."

Mr Lennard said the water company had done all it could to minimise the disruption.

He said the company had spent six months planning and conferring with interested parties such as Brighton and Hove City Council, the bus company, the emergency services, local trading groups, taxi forums and city centre manager Soozie Campbell.

Southern Water arranged with gas companies to put in gas pipes at the same time as the water pipes which meant road will not have to be ripped up again later. Workers even downed tools over the Christmas period after requests from traders.

Mr Lennard said: "To try to replace a continuous infrastructure and maintain the life of the city at the same time is a huge challenge.

Wherever we go in the city centre digging any hole is going to cause disruption.

"There are certain roads in town - we all know which ones they are - which are a horror even on a quiet day. We are aware that whatever works we are going to carry out on these streets are going to cause a delay."

Mr Lennard said Southern Water had learned from the mistakes of the last major overhaul of the water system in the 1980s and had been careful to "phase in" the work in stages whenever it could.

He said they had divided the area which needed new pipes into three and worked on them at the same time so they could tailor the scheme to suit local needs.

Noisy night work was banned from residential Hove but in the more commercial North Laine, where cafés and businesses rely on their water supply during the day, some work was done at night.

Mr Lennard also said some of the works had to be done at the same time for engineering reasons.

And he said the complex and historic "spaghetti" system of pipes meant certain points had to be worked on at the same time to provide a constant supply of water.

He said: "The water mains system is like a bowl of spaghetti and we are trying to thread a pencil through it without disrupting anything."

Do you think more could be done to limit the number of roadworks across the county? Let us know below