Paving on schedule despite rain, says city official

The wet weather over June has had only a minor impact on paving progress, says city street operations supervisor Mick Jones.

The lack of a milling machine has imposed bigger delays but even then, the work is generally on schedule, Jones said Tuesday

"It's in demand, there's not that many of them throughout the province so they do travel all over doing work," Jones said of the equipment, which removes the old pavement. "We try to coordinate our schedules with them hopefully passing through to a destination either north of us or west of us."

The paving program amounts to 20 to 25 paving days and more than half the projects council approved in its original paving plan are now done, Jones said.

"We should have been completed by the end of July easily and then council added funds that allowed us to add three more projects," Jones said. "We're not concerned at all about completing the projects in a timely fashion with reasonable weather."

Work along 15th Avenue was delayed by a day, Jones said, because authorities would not allow transport of the milling machine along B.C. highways during a long weekend when traffic can be heavier than usual.

The machine should be working on 15th Avenue this morning and after finishing work on provincial projects it should be grinding along portions of Domano, Massey and Winnipeg next week and then paving will follow.

After that, work will be carried out on Ospika Boulevard from Range Road to Tyner Boulevard; Foothills Boulevard from North Nechako Road to Foothills Bridge; and Tabor Boulevard from First to Fifteenth Avenue.

Ahead of those projects, city utility workers will be out using closed-circuit cameras to check out storm and sewage drains to make sure they're intact and, if not, they'll be repaired first. Progress will also depend on the number of side streets and tie-ins.

"If it's just a straight line, they can actually give her pretty good and get significant volume down but on Tabor Boulevard from Fifth to 15th, for example, it took them two days to pave the main route and then it took them two days to do all the side street tie-ins," Jones said.

"It's like five per cent of the total work but it took just as long because a lot of it's smaller stuff, there's more handwork."

In all, $4.4 million will be spent on this summer's work by the city.

As for the provincial projects, work at the intersection of Highways 97 and 16 should be complete by next week, a Ministry of Transportation official said, after a short delay due to rain and traffic control requirements.

"The intersection is operating efficiently and we did not want the paving to be left partially complete through the long weekend," the official said. "Crews were directed to work on Highway 97 which has brought that piece of the project ahead of schedule."