Solutions needed following lack of Highway 1 snow clearing

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Solutions are in the works for the province and its contractors after a sit-down meeting with the BC Trucking Association regarding last week’s heavy snowfall.

Almost daily, there were jack-knifed semi-trucks blocking major thoroughfares and dozens of crashes reported along Highway 1 from Burnaby to the Fraser Valley.

Dave Earle with the BC Trucking Association had a sit-down meeting with members of the Ministry of Transportation and he says he was to the point — the lack of clearing on the roads wasn’t good enough for his drivers and regular commuters.

“The ministry has quality assurance protocols and had done inspections and reviewed the work of its contractors and what our members told us was reflective of what the ministry saw, which was it was an extremely difficult event. When the temperature dropped as quickly as it did, the time lag that you have between when the road is plowed and when it freezes, was extremely quick. The salt that was put down, the brine that was put down just wasn’t as effective as the road contractor, the ministry and our members would have liked.”

He says the idea of the meeting was to review what went wrong and how to avoid a similar situation moving forward.

“Lessons learned will hopefully change this but it was just an extremely difficult event to manage because of the quickness of the freeze. There’s no pass on this. Ultimately, we were very clear saying, ‘You and the contractor are going to have to do better. The conditions of the highway were just not good enough. So, it’s a matter of taking a deeper dive on their end and saying, ‘What could have been done?’ We can always learn.”

Earle won’t go so far to say the ministry failed but he isn’t happy with how things looked. “The ministry and the contractor both recognize the conditions were just not up to what anybody expected.”

RELATED: Truckers fed up with icy roads, province blames changing weather

What exactly the solutions will look like remain unclear. “Really taking a look at what was used and when. Really reviewing what the deployment was, where the equipment was, and how long it took to get it back out there. You can think of it as you’re clearing your driveway. If you’re clearing your driveway every five minutes, it’s going to be right down to bare pavement — that’s not practical but the conditions we had were unacceptable. We have to find a way forward to say, ‘How can we get more frequent clearing during a real significant freeze event and make sure the road conditions weren’t as they were.”

He’s confident the solutions will be placed in for the next time it snows in this province and that doesn’t mean next winter. “We provide the feedback. We provide the commentary. Our members can provide real-time reporting and what’s going on. Some of the conversations were really interesting to read on social media because you had individuals who were stuck, who had observed different things and as they got to their terminals were advising others. It was really informative and we certainly offered to share that with the ministry.”

At last check, ICBC confirmed it had taken more than 18,000 dial-a-claim reports during the week of Jan. 10 – Jan. 15.

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