Latest crash Another strain on municipal resources
Emergencies on highway are costly, expose residents to dangers, mayors say
A day after a bus crash near Prescott sent dozens to hospital, mayors of rural municipalities bordering the 401 say highway emergencies are costing their taxpayers and exposing their residents to danger
A 54-year-old passenger on the bus loaded with Chinese tourists died of his injuries, Ontario Provincial Police said Tuesday morning. Other victims remained in hospital with life-threatening injuries.
Mayors said their hearts go out to the victims and their families. But at the same time, the incident has reignited questions of the strain critical incidents place on the municipalities along the 401 corridor.
Among the costs they must shoulder with no or only partial compensation from the province: road repairs due to heavy use while traffic is being detoured from the 401 while a collision scene is cleared and investigated.
Brett Todd, mayor of Prescott and vice-president of the Eastern Ontario Mayors’ Caucus, says that whenever there is a detour from the 401, whether it’s construction or a collision, the town’s main street becomes a “wall-to-wall traffic jam.”
That places residents at risk, not only of injuries, but also because firefighters and paramedics can’t respond to calls in a timely manner, he said. “When the 401 is closed, I don’t sleep at night.”
Mayors have been calling for 401 expansion for years without a serious response from the government, he said.
“It’s really not a partisan issue here. We’re all united in the fact that we need to expand the 401. We just need to get Queen’s Park to listen to us.”
Detours cause significant pressure on county roads used as detours, said Ian McLeod, the mayor of South Glengarry and warden of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry.
Upper-tier roads, typically twolane paved county roads constructed to a higher standard, are designated as detour roads. “But anyone with a GPS tries to find the quickest way back onto the highway,” he said.
“We have trucks going on roads that are not designed for that. And the substrate gets damaged. If we submit the costs to the province, we won’t get any compensation.”
Rural municipalities are also called upon to provide service to calls on Highway 401, whether it’s a serious accident or a motorist whose engine has overheated, he said.
About half of the calls are not compensated by the province, said McLeod, who estimates the cost to his municipality is between $20,000 to $30,000 a year. Calls for paramedics to the highway also take those services away from taxpayers who have paid for those services, he said.
There is even the occasional case where a 401 crash ends up costing a municipality money. In one example, a vehicle left the highway, went through a fence and ended up on a municipal road, says McLeod. There was no compensation from the province.
On another occasion, a fire truck on its way to a call in inclement weather was involved into an collision and flipped into a ditch. The fire truck was a writeoff and it cost $350,000 to replace it. A volunteer firefighter on the truck has still not returned to work. The province’s response was to go to the municipality’s insurer, said McLeod.
A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Transport said the province supports the funding of municipal roads and bridges in smaller municipalities through programs such as the Ontario Community Infrastructure Fund, which provides municipalities with a total of up to $200 million a year to invest in infrastructure. The fund also provides up to $100 million a year on application-based funding.
Municipalities are reimbursed for the cost of providing emergency fire and rescue services on provincial highways owned by the ministry, but the province does not pay for emergency services on municipal roads as a result of detours. Municipalities can bill drivers directly for emergency services, she said.
In March 2017, a 30-vehicle crash near Mallorytown east of Kingston killed the driver of a tractor trailer and sent 29 people to hospital, including 13 first responders who underwent decontamination after hydrofluoric acid spilled at the scene. The 401 was closed for 30 hours.
Volunteer firefighters with the township of Leeds and the Thousand Islands responded to the call. The municipality had to spend more than $250,000 the replace breathing equipment and bunker gear because it was contaminated, said Mayor Joe Baptista. The municipality was eventually compensated, but only because it was a provincially significant incident, he said.
Baptista said the firefighters were well prepared for the incident. Although the municipality has fewer than 10,000 residents, it has its own training centre.
“We are at the heart of three major transportation corridors. We have rail, we have the 401 and we have the St. Lawrence River,” said Baptista. “The law of averages means eventually you’ll have to deal with a major incident.”
In the wake of the spill, thent ransportation minister Steven Del Duca agreed to work with representatives of the Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus and the mayors’ caucus to improve the safety of transporting hazardous goods.
Robin Jones, warden of the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville, said the working group succeeded in getting stakeholders together, including the province, Transport Canada and the Ontario Trucking Association.
The group came to a consensus about seven recommendations, including a study of high-risk factors that contribute to distracted and aggressive driving and the potential for standardized training for drivers who transport hazardous goods.
“The way of moving forward is to continue to build consensus and ways to make the highway safer,” said Jones. “I think it’s doable. This working group was unprecedented in the number of stakeholders that came together.”
What would the parties do if they won?
In their platform, the Progressive Conservatives say they will “actively explore potential for high-speed rail and highway projects including the potential of widening to six lanes Highway 401 to the 416 between Toronto and Ottawa.”
The NDP’s platform commits to restoring and increasing the Ontario municipal partnership fund, which is the main transfer to municipalities. The NDP says this would allow communities to make locally focused decisions on how best to improve roads in their communities. The NDP would also bring winter road maintenance back into public hands.
The Liberals say their platform increases annual funding to the Connecting Links program by $30 million year. The program supports the rehabilitation or reconstruction of municipal roads or bridges that connect two ends of a provincial highway through a community.
It’s really not a partisan issue here. We’re all united in the fact that we need to expand the 401. We just need to get Queen’s Park to listen to us.