Durrell Road residents says they won’t give up fighting to have the road rebuilt and have their fire protection permanently restored.
The road has been decommissioned leaving the 20 residents outside of the fire protection zone.
Bob Seguin is one of those residents. “They took numerous loads out to another site, the Dale Kersley Landing site, and used the material to shore up that project. It was quite a surprise actually that they showed up so quick because we were gaining some traction on having the road rebuilt and then all of a sudden out of the blue, after three years of them saying that they were going to rebuild the road, that all of a sudden they’re there and they decommissioned the road, they didn’t even leave a walking trail for the residents to go down and get their mail.”
Seguin says there has been very little communication and they can’t get people to return their calls.
“They handed two papers out to two people at the bottom of the hill and none of us up at the top of the hill here have ever been notified regarding the decommissioning up here. They were going to put two turnarounds in, two cul-de-sacs, and they didn’t do that. They took the material from the road and left.” And they’ve got a project manager in Kamloops, Dan Alyword with Stantec, and he’s been called numerous times and does not return phone calls at all. The MOT itself, it’s like they’re ghosts, they just come and go as they please, they don’t answer to anybody.”
Seguin says the Ministry keeps throwing around a number of 50 million dollars to fix Durrell Road and he can’t figure out where they are getting it from.
He says they’re not looking for a state-of-the-art highway.
“No, we’re after just a one land dirt road and that was part of their initial proposal was, one of the options was “a farmer’s fix.” The fellow from McElhanney Engineering said two machines, two days and it would be done. The guy in charge of the Hydraulic Road project said Durrell Road would have been the easiest out of all 10 slides (In the Cariboo Road Recovery Program) to repair.”
Seguin says there was no sign of moisture in the material that they took out.
Neil Muir is also a resident on Durrell Road.
“Another thing was that the road itself, taking that material out of there, will make that hill even more unstable because they’ve taken the retaining wall of the road that was holding that bank up which they keep telling us is sliding, when it hasn’t slid for over five years. And they keep telling us that they’ve had these geotech surveys done, and Sheldon (Clare) has also talked to them about that and wants the information from them, but nobody seems to know where these geotech information sheets are that would actually tell that this road was going away.”
Sequin says the reasoning behind the closure of their road is apparently that it cost too much on a per capita basis, but he says that also doesn’t add up.
“Greg Bruce at highways was in charge of these 10 slides. He says the cost per capita was too great and it’s an outright lie because Hydraulic Road is being totally rebuilt, and there is less than 20 households out on Hydraulic Road.”
Muir added that there were just four families that live down at the bottom of Dale Landing Road and they’re fixing that for in the millions.
Sequin says the bottom line is that the residents are calling on the province to rebuild their road.
“That would be job one would be to replace Durrell Road, because a lot of the facts, they’re not transparent, like they’re not giving us the facts. We saw that road being taken apart and there was absolutely no moisture there, so job 1 would be replace Durrell Road. Admit they made a mistake and to replace Durrell Road.”
He says fixing up nearby Brotherhood Road would be plan B.
“Brotherhood Road, it’s just an alternate route, it would put us back into the fire protection.”
The Cariboo Regional District has extended the allowance for distance for fire protection for a period of one year to Jan 1st, 2027.
“The CRD, because we have a legacy of being in the District, and that has been taken away so the CRD has the option of extending the distance as they have done on a short term basis. So one of the long term things might be for them to just acknowledge that it is an injustice, and to extend the distance.”
Seguin says they have talked about using legal channels to try to get their road back but he says they don’t want to go down that road at this point.
