Under normal circumstances, driving along Chief Lake Road and its background vistas of unspoiled forests and well-kept acreages through lake country is a pleasant experience.
But on rainy Thursday afternoon that trip to pick up his daughter at Ness Lake Bible Camp became a hellish journey for Jason Peters. In a seal-coating project gone wrong, his car was left with what appears to be an expensive cleaning bill to remove the tar and aggregate material that coated the wheels, body and undercarriage and made for a hazardous return trip to his College Heights home.
The area that was being worked on started at Pilot Mountain Road and continued west on Chief Lake Road for several kilometres.
“They had a guy there telling people to go slow, but the further you get it just became more and more of a disaster,” said Peters. “I didn’t realize how bad it was until I got out of the car at Ness Lake Bible Camp and my tires were coated in this goopy, slimy mess. I’ve never seen anything like it.
“What a mess, it was unbelievable. It’s an absolute disaster.”
On the trip back, Peters was told by a road crew worker to keep his speed under 20 kilometres per hour, which he says he did, but the buildup of debris on his car was enough to force him to pull over to the side of the road as soon as he was back on solid pavement.
“It was even worse - to be honest I didn’t even feel safe driving the vehicle,” Peters said. “If you’ve ever driven over a seal-coating project you know you’re just down to the roadbed and there’s a fine layer of seal-coating on the road bed. This was like driving on a bumpy gravel road that was almost not drivable and in that sense I’m surprised they let people through. Especially on the way back, I could really feel the vehicle slipping and sliding underneath me. It felt like driving in soup.”
Peters pulled in to a car wash at the east end of Chief Lake Road and tried, unsuccessfully, to spray the debris off the wheels and body of his 2014 Hyundai Accent. He was not alone in his misery. While he was trying to remove the goop from his vehicle he met several other drivers left in the same predicament after they passed through that section of road Thursday.
“I was driving back on the Hart Highway and the car was making all these sounds,” he said. “Every time I’d brake there was this rubbing sound, just an unnatural sound you don’t ever want to hear coming from your car. I think were sounds coming from under the hood, I don’t know if the tar got into the belts, but the bottom line is the car is not safe to drive.
“I contacted ICBC and they advised me to keep it parked and have it towed to a shop to have it looked at. I’ll have to get a full top-to-bottom inspection and I’ll see what they say in terms of being able to fix it and what it’s going to cost.”
The rural road is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. Yellowhead Road and Bridge holds the contract to repair and maintain the road and the Chief Lake Road work is being conducted by a sub-contractor. The Citizen is awaiting comment from both parties.
Eric Karjaluoto of Vancouver is with his family visiting his parents at Ness Lake and he made the trip east into the city on Chief Lake Road at about noon on Thursday. The tires of Toyota truck were also thickly coated in road materials and the body was spattered with tar but not to the same extent that Peters experienced. Karajaluoto said the rain Thursday likely contributed to the nightmarish conditions that left so many motorists angry.
“I just looked like a gravel road and normally it doesn’t make that much noise, but it was raining really heavily, which I kind of gather must have had some effect,” said Karjaluoto, who posted on Facebook a photo of his wheel dripping thick globs of tar. “Later I talked to someone in the car wash whose mom had been there a couple hours earlier, free of any incident.
“Our truck felt very uneven driving, like there was something stuck to it, and when we pulled off and looked the wheels were covered in a thick layer of tar. We tried to wash it off and the car wash and that had zero impact. We got away pretty nicely, it’s just little splatters of tar, but it’s in the door on the roof and on the frame, kind of dripping out. Mine is not a disastrous scenario, it’s an inconvenience.”
Karjaluoto avoided the mess on his return trip by traveling on forest service roads to get back to Ness Lake. He wants to know what YRB plans to do before he decides on whether it submit an insurance claim.
