Curiosity got the best of Les Arcand. He walked onto a construction site hoping to see for himself why a section of Highway 302 west of Prince Albert has been washed out for four months.
He was told to leave the site.
“It’s the public highway. We want to see what’s going on and we’ve waited long enough,” Arcand said.
A sinkhole that developed on the highway in early May has since forced residents to drive a 13-kilometre detour on gravel roads. The province initially tried fixing the road by boring a culvert through the embankment, but the ground was too unstable.
“We started drilling into the north side at first. We moved to the south side and did some pretty significant boring there — we got about half of the culvert installed — then we had mechanical problems. The machine broke down,” said Joel Cherry, a spokesperson for Saskatchewan Highways and Infrastructure.
“We’re taking a bit of a different tact now.”
Geotechnical and mechanical problems, along with uncooperative weather, have increased delays as well as the project budget — which now sits at $1.3 million. A quarter of the budget has been used to maintain the gravel road detour.
“It just appears that, despite having three or four hundred homes out there and a number of businesses that count on Highway 302, the government just doesn’t care,” said Buckley Belanger, the Saskatchewan NDP highways critic.
Residents told CTV they estimate 500 vehicles have been using the detour each day and that the gravel has caused damage to their vehicles. They’ve started submitting towing and damage receipts to the province.
“In some cases if they can prove there was an issue with the road that caused the damage, they can be compensated, but it depends,” said Cherry.
The Ministry of Highways said the repair on Highway 302 is about halfway done. Officials couldn’t give an exact completion date but said area residents like Les Arcand will have to use the detour until sometime this fall.
