Announcements, updates and news on new projects, events, and initiatives impacting your community.
When a tsunami warning prompted evacuations to community muster stations in Tofino and Ucluelet this week (the event happened in the early morning of Jan 23, 2018), it highlighted how vital Highway 4 is as an emergency and supply route. Coincidently, the alert happened the same day we were hosting a public open house in Tofino about the Highway 4 Kennedy Hill safety improvements. The project includes upgrading 1.5 kilometres of steep, curvy road along Kennedy Lake by: Widening...
At the March 2016 project open house, many local folks voiced concerns about the volume of water that sometimes saturates the area. When we tested different high water scenarios, using a hydraulic model, we recognized that the new section of road would actually need 11 large flood relief culverts, and the bridge would have to be five metres longer to accommodate the Tsolum River when things got extra wet.
Can’t you hear the whistle blowing? This summer (June 2017, to be exact), the first train went over the new CN Rail crossing at the Stone Creek to Williams Road project. This is a significant milestone for the project, which is upgrading 3 km of Highway 97 from two lanes to four lanes as part of the Cariboo Connector Program. With the new bridge now operational, crews are now turning their attention to decommissioning and removing the old bridge....
Planning on heading over the Coquihalla this summer? Head’s up! A couple of construction projects may slow you down a bit. That’s because we are working on improving parts of BC Highway 5 between Hope and Merritt from April to October, 2017. It sucks. We know. But it’s for a good reason. We appreciate your patience. Here are the details: First up – Box Canyon Chain Up Area Expansion Northbound commercial vehicle traffic on the Coquihalla Highway is often...
What the heck is a Geoscientist and how does the work they do help highway travel in BC? It’s National Geoscience and Engineering Month in Canada and to recognize that, we reached out to Alexandra McGladrey, G.I.T. to chat and learn more about the great work that our she and other geoscientists on staff do. Alexandra joined the ministry through our Engineer-In-Training/Geoscientist-In- Training program and gave us tonnes of great insight into the role… March is National Engineering and...
In Canada, we celebrate National Engineering and Geoscience Month in March, highlighting the importance of engineering as a career and its impact on our daily lives. Engineering is such a HUGE part of what we do at the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. From wildlife overpasses to Port Mann cable collars to rip rap to speed limits, it’s all covered with an engineering expertise. To showcase some of the work we do, we collected some of our most popular...
Rushing rivers and soaring mountains make for a beautiful road trip, but when it comes to widening and improving highways, those same breathtaking features can pose an incredible challenge. Few highways in BC are more beautiful or challenging than the Kicking Horse Canyon along Highway 1. Constructed through Kicking Horse Pass in 1962 and following basically the original Canadian Pacific Rail route, this portion of the Trans-Canada Highway reaches its highest point at an elevation of 1,643 metres or...
Westside Road is a narrow, picturesque, two-lane road running along Okanagan Lake in the BC interior. Its dramatic beauty and winding roads make it a pretty popular route for motorists of all types. To keep this road safe and accessible for everyone, we’re widening and realigning 1.2 km of the road between Four Mile Creek and Waterfront Farm (north of the Highway 97 and Westside Road interchange in West Kelowna). We took a short video in the fall of...
