By paNOW Staff

NDP highways critic joins public outcry over Highway 302

Jul 13, 2014 | 1:27 PM

It’s been just over two months since a washout on Highway 302 forced Highways and Infrastructure to close the road.

Residents from the RM of Duck Lake came together on Thursday night to bring forth their complaints about the length of time the fix has taken and the conditions of the detour.

Athabasca MLA Buckley Belanger attended the meeting as well.

“The rain created the problem but I think the level of anger and frustration in the room itself was how the government responded to it,” said Belanger. “The government was warned about the situation that was occurring there as long as last summer. They didn’t respond to it.”

Belanger said ignoring the problem only leads to it costing more money.

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“This has been going on for a while and how much more money is it costing the tax payers and the people of that area in terms of safe travel and frustration, because the government hasn’t responded to it well,” said Belanger. “It just stokes the anger there because it should have been taken care of a long time ago.”

Joel Cherry with the Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure said it’s just a collection of unfortunate events.

“We’re doing everything we can, it’s just an unfortunate coincidence of factors with the weather there that’s setting us back,” said Cherry. “Anytime there’s a road closed we treat it as an emergency situation and we want to make sure we get the road open again as soon as possible so people can travel normally.”

While not directly speaking on the government’s lack of response in the first place Cherry did explain why the project had dragged on beyond the proposed completion date.

“The issue with this project is that the contractor has to bore a 1.5 meter culvert through the embankment,” said Cherry. “That’s a challenge because it’s a 14 meter high embankment and its wet, so every time there’s been one or two inches of rain there it’s set the project back three or four days.”

“They have to use a large boring machine to go through the embankment, and when there are wet conditions there it is simply not safe to carry out the work.”
Cherry said they have been pumping water away from the site but more rain meant more water to pump.

He added that they hope to have repairs finished by the end of the month, but once again warned that more rain could continue to slow down the process.
As for the future of that section of highway Cherry said that the new culvert should prevent a washout like this from happening again in the future.

“That can handle a high capacity, we’ve had the hydraulics checked on it by several different designers and we’re confident that this sort of thing won’t be repeated in the future,” said Cherry.

Belanger said that they negligence the government showed in addressing the issues with 302 before it was washed out shows that Prince Albert is on their back burner.

“It just doesn’t seem that the Prince Albert area is important to this government,” said Belanger. “People have to start to speak up and speak out, and I think they’ve got to get organized and I think they’ve got to start banging on doors at the minister of highways office.”

“A lot of people pay a lot of taxes in PA so maybe they should get the amount of respect that is due and owed to them.”

Belanger said he will be bringing more light to this issue in Regina.

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Twitter: @princealbertnow