Suprise

I just received an answer to an email I sent to the Ministry of Transportation 2 months ago, some of which I will share here.

" I appreciate the effort you have made to document your concerns. Please be assured my ministry takes its commitment to the safety of our

transportation network very seriously. The performance of our
maintenance contractors is an integral part of this commitment, and
ministry staff regularly audit and evaluate their performance to ensure
they are meeting our standards and work with them to quickly address any
maintenance issues that arise."  The significance of this statement is: maybe some one is really looking at this, albeit with a little prodding.

"
Ministry staff have reviewed your concerns about washboards and culverts
and advise me Interior Roads Ltd., the maintenance contractor
responsible for roads in the Horsefly area, have been undertaking
ongoing repair to the infrastructure in this area. Since 2007, extensive
ditching has been done on Bells Lake Road and 108 Mile Road, and
gravelling work has been done on 108 Mile, Bells Lake, Black Creek,
Lowden, Millar and Horsefly Lake roads. In addition, $1 million has been
invested in the resurfacing of an additional 10 kilometres of Horsefly
Lake Road this year" It is good to see that there is some further work going to be done on these roads. We all realize this, however it is not that work is going to be done but the quality of the work as well as,in some cases, why (?). See my last post on the installation of culverts on Bells Lake Road.

The next bit is of significance and should be noted by everyone in this area:

If you have questions about these improvements, please don't hesitate to
contact Nick Antifaeff, Area Manager of Roads for my ministry's Cariboo
District.  He can be reached at 250 398-4520 or by e-mail at
Nick.Antifaeff@gov.bc.ca.

There is more in this email which I will share in another post with comments

Bells Lake Road - Culverts part 2 or 3

Well I went and had a look at the culverts recently installed that I mentioned in a recent post. Here I thought that they had removed the old ones and installed 2 new ones! Why they would do that in the first place was a bit of a mystery to me. However I was not disappointed? They actually added 2 more culverts. That makes 4 to handle spring time run off during a 2 week period. See below:
You will note in the above picture the 4 culverts. This picture is taken on the exit side and you will note that the marked culvert actually runs up hill. I wonder if this is an engineering feature. I also wonder if the maintenance folks mistook the direction of flow. You will note that his area is well cleared. Now take a look at the entrance side of the road.


The normal procedure in road construction is that a catchment basin is dug in this area. Now I sure everyone knows why?
1. It gives the water a place to gather where it will eventually rise and begin to flow through the culverts. A natural flow control if you will. Come on folks this is not rocket science.
2. A catchment basin also is a place where flotsam will gather which can be cleaned out easily.


As you can see here, there should be some trouble this spring

This must also be an engineering feature. Place the culvert up high enough and it should take only a little water.

I had a look at the old culverts and they both had mud in them. In short they did not appear to have been cleaned out.

Now all this leads to several questions:

1. Was this installation engineered:
2. Why did they not pull the 2 old culverts out and replace them with a larger single culvert with a welded wire screen at the inlet
end. They could have reused the old culverts and still have 2 nice new shinny ones left to use.
3. Does anyone know what the average flow rate is during flooding. This would determine the size of culvert needed!
4. What is the size of the catchment area. This information would also help to determine what size of culvert would be needed.

I suppose we should be thankful that this was done. Only the coming spring run off will determine if it was done right.

Our tax dollars at work. In these severe economic times it is comforting to know that a great deal of thought is going into the maintenance of our roads.

More to come. It's a never ending source of discussion.