Construction to rebuild and realign West Fraser Road, replacing the road that was washed out by flooding in 2018, will begin later this year.
It will take almost two years to complete however, as there is a lot of work that has to be done on the 103.4 million dollar project.
Todd Hubner is the District Manager with the Ministry of Transportation in Quesnel…
“It’s over 900 thousand cubic meters of material that we have to drill, blast and remove. There is a new structure of course, a new 100 meter plus long bridge so there is going to be piles that are going to need to be driven for that, and that’s all after we get the work tendered and awarded, so there is still work to do in getting us to that point.”
Hubner says they still have permits to secure for different aspects of the work, land acquisitions to undertake, and some archeology to do.
He is confident that whoever gets the contract, local or not, there will be local contractors working on this project.
Hubner says they appreciate the patience of Narcosli, Buckridge and Esdilagh residents but a lot of work had to be done first to get to this point…
“Anytime you’re trying to acquire more than 100 million dollars from government there is certainly an amount of process, particularly when you’re dealing with two levels of government. The first step of course was we had to finalize what that dollar value looked like, so we had literally over a year of engineering work to get us to the point where we could make a treasury board submission to go forward with the request for funds. So, you can call them hoops, we call them process, but ya it was a significant undertaking for sure.”
The funding for the project was announced yesterday by the province.
The money comes out of Public Safety Canada’s Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangement.