A FORGOTTEN ROAD
Rough stretch in Valley Mills may slow emergency response times, say residents
Unpaved section in Valley Mills has more potholes than road.
All of Marble Mountain Road is paved with the exception of a roughly four-kilometre stretch that residents say is jeopardizing emergency response times and disappointing tourists.
Volunteer firefighter Lester LeBlanc said there are dozens of potholes littering a section of roadway in the community of Valley Mills, located along the Bras d’Or Lake scenic drive, in Inverness County.
Residents of the rural community say driving is particularly bad in the spring and fall as there is very little gravel left on the roadway.
“It should have been paved probably 30 years ago when the rest of the roads were paved and they sort of stopped at that section,” said LeBlanc, who lives in nearby Malagawatch.
“It never got done and so it is basically called the forgotten road.”
Maintenance work has only been carried out in recent years, said LeBlanc, after several complaints were made to the province’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal.
“They don’t come out and do anything on their own,” LeBlanc said. “They don’t put any money into this road but some of the other counties seem have a whole lot of money poured into them.”
The Valley Mills fire hall is located on the unpaved section, making it difficult for firefighters to drive vehicles carrying 1,500 gallons of water. To test response times, LeBlanc set a timer on his phone last week as he travelled from the fire station to the paved section. He said it took him over nine minutes to drive the 3.8 kilometres.
“If we had to call an ambulance in and pick up an injured patient anywhere in this area they would have to drive on that road, most likely,” said LeBlanc. “If somebody had a back injury or head injury you can imagine the motion that the ambulance would go through.”
LeBlanc suspects there would also be about a 15-20-minute delay in responding to an emergency, such as a fire. He is now asking for ditches to be dug, culverts to be replaced and gravel to be added to the section.
Valley Mills resident Irene Chisholm said that tourists have even expressed their sympathy over the state of the road.
“There’s not much road in between the potholes,” Chisholm said Friday. “In the summer tourists have stopped and said: ‘you have this beautiful scenery but ,my God, your roads . . .’
“We pick our times to go out. I mean, I try not to go out any more than I have to because of the road. The grader can come on it today and with the mud it’s the same way tomorrow because there’s nothing to grade.”
Inverness MLA Allan MacMaster said Friday that gravel roads are the main complaint from residents who contacted his constituency office. He agreed that government is spending on less regular maintenance, but noted Valley Mills could qualify for the province’s Gravel Road Capital Program introduced last year.
“The maintenance budget for those roads has been 25 per cent less for the last eight years, which is the equivalent of two whole years where you might say roads haven’t gotten any maintenance,” said MacMaster.
“So as a result, over time, when roads aren’t getting maintained as well or as frequently they start to deteriorate.”