Work has started on a busy main road which is expected to last more than three weeks.

Multi-way traffic lights have been set up on the A2 Hartlip Hill in Sittingbourne for drainage maintenance.

A section of the road has been cordoned off and several engineers were spotted working with diggers and drills.

It started on Monday (September 23) and is set to last until Friday, October 18.

Breach Lane will also be shut at the junction with the A2 on October 2 and 3. Drivers have a four-mile diversion route along London Road, Oak Lane and Forge Lane.

The roadworks are already causing long delays during rush hours.

One person on Facebook commented: “It’s ridiculous! It was letting about five cars go towards Rainham this morning.”

Another said: “A nightmare for a very long time.”

One motorist said it added an extra 20 minutes onto their journey as cars backed up to Newington High Street.

A resident who lives along the road says she is trying to avoid peak times when leaving her home.

“At 9.30am the queues were stretching to Keycol Hill,” she explained. “It was at least a mile and a half of traffic.

"It’s likely that it will finish and another roadwork will pop up somewhere else along the road!”

The temporary traffic lights allow KCC Highways to “renew highway drainage assets and help reduce surface water flooding” in the area.

On their website, it says: “We use a risk-based approach to maintaining over 250,000 highway drains and have implemented a cyclical maintenance regime for all roads across the network, which allows us to attend more of our assets in a proactive and cost-effective manner each year.

“The drains on our strategic road network will be cleaned annually.

“Minor roads will be cleaned every one, two or three years, with their cleaning cycle based on risk factors such as road hierarchy, speed limit and whether it is a known flood zone.

“These factors combined produce individual risk weighting for every minor road across the network, which in turn influences how often we attend.”