Reopening Highway 97 to take a few more days
This week’s planned reopening put off to early next week after slide turns out to be bigger than was thought
Twenty-five days after a rock slide closed Highway 97 just north of Summerland, B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation is hopeful the road will reopen to motorists early next week.
Steve Sirett, the Okanagan Shuswap district transportation manager, was on scene Tuesday morning to monitor the $750,000and-rising cleanup of 13,000 cubic metres of rock and debris.
That’s enough to fill five Olympic-sized swimming pools. The debris is now sitting in a ministry-owned pit not far from the site, around which vehicles are being detoured on Callan Road.
“We’ve been making really good process over the last week hauling material out of the site,” Sirett said. “It’s about double what our original estimate was. Our estimate now for this slide is about 27,000 cubic metres.”
When all is said and done, Sirett expects the price tag for cleanup will have topped $1 million.
An original timeline for the highway to reopen this week was pushed to next week because the failure of the slope was much deeper than was originally thought.
The hope was to find solid, stable rock under all of the debris that wouldn’t need to be hauled away, which would have sped up the reopening.
Sirett was surprised when he first saw the slide in person.
“It was way bigger than we thought. The pictures are great, but they don’t do it justice. You can’t get the scale of how high up it was,” he said.
“Callan Road was really fortunate,” Sirett added, saying that had there not been such a convenient detour, the ministry may have looked at a single-lane option on the highway, although it would have slowed work.
And Sirett couldn’t stress enough the importance of safety for both crews and motorists, explaining that while the option of working through the night has been considered, work has only been done during daylight as a precaution.
“The team that has been out here, the dedication that they have shown in some very cold, cold weather, is truly amazing,” Sirett said.
No movement has been noted at the slide site for the past 13 days.