The scale of damage in British Columbia as winter approaches will make it difficult to repair highways washed away by flooding during heavy rains this week, experts warn.
Floods, mudslides, land subsidence, “this is unprecedented, both in the number of sites affected and the area affected,” said Joe Wrobel, president of JPW Road and Bridge, a company specializing in construction and road maintenance in the Okanagan region.
Despite the extent of the damage, Mr Wrobel, whose company is not directly involved in the reconstruction work, maintains that there are protocols already in place for the emergency work and that the government of the British Columbia has already compiled a list of contractors and equipment that would be available for the work.
But before starting work, geotechnical studies will have to be carried out, Wrobel said in an interview.
“The priority will be to rescue people and then it will be necessary to ensure that the infrastructure is safe or at least that the restoration work will ensure safe travel,” he said.
Brenda McCabe, president of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, also believes that authorities will first have to ensure that the work can be done safely.
“We must ensure that the slopes that remain are stable and that the teams that will be deployed can get there in peace,” she said in an interview.
“In areas where the roads have been washed away, engineers will have to decide whether to rebuild from new plans,” decisions that may need to be made on a case-by-case basis, McCabe believes.
“We will also have to take into account what we now know about climate change and the resulting meteorological phenomena,” she said.
Important road links in the southern part of the province were inundated or affected by mudslides and even landslides, as torrential rains hit British Columbia from Saturday to Monday.
How long it takes to fix everything will depend on the extent of the damage, says Ahmed Rteil, a professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia on the Okanagan campus.
“In places where entire sections of the road have been washed away, studying soil damage and stability can take more than two weeks,” he said.
“It is only when you know these are the modalities for stabilizing the ground that you can consider building a new road or a new bridge,” he said.
“As the mercury drops below zero and the frost sets in, it will not only be a challenge for the work, but also for the movement of the heavy machinery needed in mountainous terrain,” he said sorry. .
Mr. Rteil also fears that such meteorological phenomena will become more frequent in the future. He points out that the extreme heat and forest fires that ravaged British Columbia earlier this summer killed several trees, contributing to the risk of subsidence.
“When the vegetation disappears, the slopes then become more unstable,” he said.
“Repairing roads where there is a lot of debris can be fairly straightforward in some places, but it will also require temporary bridges and detours in other places until the work can be completed,” says Wrobel.
“The areas where the water level has risen the most will present the greatest challenges,” adds the former president of the Canadian Construction Association.
The sheer amount of work to be done adds to the complexity of the matter and provincial authorities will have to establish which work will be a priority, according to Wrobel who is confident that road builders across the country are ready to get started. work.
In more than 40 years of career, he says he has already seen projects in places with such extensive damage, but never in such large numbers and at the same time.