SaltWire E-Edition

Road plan isn’t enough, some say

Improvements coming to some provincial roads

DIANE CROCKER WEST COAST REPORTER diane.crocker@thewesternstar.com @Ws_dianecrocker

CORNER BROOK — Erika Campbell travels north and south on Route 430, the Northern Peninsula Highway, regularly and can attest that the road conditions in either direction are not good.

“No maid,” the Daniel’s Harbour resident said when talking with Salt wire Network on Tuesday, May 17. “It will really rock your socks off.”

Campbell knows where the bad spots — ruts, potholes in the pavement, washed out shoulders and rebar sticking out of bridges — are and when she needs to slow down or take measures to avoid them.

She said it’s about time the province allots funding for roads on the peninsula.

That has happened to some degree. On May 16, the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure released its provincial roads plan, listing the road construction projects that will be undertaken in the 2022-2023 construction season.

To date, tenders for 61 road construction projects have been issued, which are in addition to 45 highway construction contracts awarded in 2021 that are beginning or continuing this spring.

Six of those projects are on the Northern Peninsula, but Campbell said there are a lot more than six areas that need addressing and she was particularly disappointed to learn the Portland Creek bridge is not one of them.

“How the heck can you not be looking at doing a proper repave of that and giving it some structural (repairs)?” she said.

“You can’t get anywhere on this peninsula without going over there.”

She recently posted a video on the Great Northern Peninsula Road Conditions Facebook group, showing rebar sticking out of the concrete of the bridge.

She figures the post drew some attention to the bridge because when she drove over it a few days later it had been patched.

“This is what they do consistently, is they just throw a patch, throw a patch, throw a patch and now the whole thing is rotted.”

If the road conditions aren’t bad enough, Campbell said, drivers often come up on them without any warning.

“And the next thing you know your (vehicle is) out of alignment. You need to get your tires rebalanced. You need to get your alignment done. Or worse, you’ve blown a tire and busted up a rim.” Campbell knows road conditions are bad all over the province, and the province’s short construction season is not helping when it comes to making repairs. “We have a small window that we can do this kind of work.”

One area that will see some work is Route 431 on the south side of Bonne Bay between Glenburnie-birchy Head-shoal Brook and Woody Point.

It’s an area that municipal councils and businesspeople have been calling for improvement to for some time.

“We had been notified yesterday evening that sections will be done and we’re not sure how much pavement they’re going to lay or if they are going to do all the road,” said Woody Point Mayor Irene Martin.

But one thing she knows for sure is that paving only sections of the road is not enough.

“Because the road is in terrible shape from Glenburnie to Woody Point and on to Trout River,” Martin said.

The road is the only connection residents in the area have with the rest of the province, and over the past year, Martin said, there has been some patching done on the road, but it hasn’t been enough to keep the road from getting worse.

She said the town will contact the government to find out what will be done.

Martin is not just the mayor, she’s also the owner of Martins Transportation Ltd., and has seen an increase in repairs needed on the company’s vehicles because of the road’s condition.

“It’s just not a good road to be travelling on every day, not in the shape it’s in,” she said.

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2022-05-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://saltwire.pressreader.com/article/281582359235227

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