By Abigail Popple, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, RMG
Hundreds of travelers heading south found themselves in Valemount for an extended period of time last Thursday following a fatal accident that closed a 13.1 kilometre stretch of Highway 5.
Travelers who spoke with The Goat were frustrated with the lack of an easily-accessible detour.
Cam Wild, who was stopped on his journey from Edmonton to Kamloops along with his wife, was unsure of whether to stay in Valemount and wait out the closure.
“We’re debating about whether to just go to Prince George, and then south, but that’s nine hours to Kamloops,” he said.
Wild hadn’t checked BC Drive – the website with information on road hazards and closures in B.C. – before leaving early in the morning, but he wasn’t sure it would have made a difference.
“Even when we did check it online, it doesn’t tell you anything other than that the road is shut. It doesn’t say how long its been. It says it’s being investigated, but that’s it,” Wild said.
Steve Game, on a visit to western Canada from the U.K., was likewise stopped during his road trip to Kamloops.
“We left Jasper this morning nice and early and got down to the first roadblock,” Game said. “We turned around, came back here and stocked up on groceries and refueled. We’ll sit here until it’s open.”
Neither Wild nor Game responded to a follow-up email asking how long they stayed in Valemount due to the closure.
Commercial truck drivers faced their own sets of difficulties from the closure. Hargun Preet, a Saskatchewan-based truck driver en route to Richmond, decided to stay overnight.
According to Preet, the federally-mandated electronic driving logs automatically record the amount of time a truck is driving, and are used to enforce a mandatory eight consecutive hours of rest daily. Extra time spent idling in traffic cut down on the remaining 16 hours allotted to drivers, meaning many truck drivers had to stay in Valemount overnight, he told The Goat.
“For other people in traffic, it’s like a six-hour delay. But for me, it’s gonna cost like two days of my weekend here,” he said.
Delays caused by vehicle incidents are common in Preet’s experience.
“It’s just part of trucking,” he said. “They take too much time to clear the roads. It happens everywhere. In Calgary, where they have bigger highways, the same situation goes on up there, they take multiple hours to clear the roads.”
Pete Pearson, a Valemount Councillor and president of the Trans Canada Yellowhead Highway Association – an organization that advocates for various improvements to highway infrastructure – took the incident as a reminder of the importance of safe highways.
“As President of the TCYHA I extend our thoughts and prayers to those involved and their families,” he wrote in an email to The Goat. “Today’s very serious incident emphasizes the need for improved transportation infrastructure on our highways. Adding more passing lanes on both Highway 5 and Highway 16 will allow for safer travel for local, tourist and commercial traffic.”
“Education and enhanced enforcement don’t seem to be reducing the tragic numbers of lives lost on our highways,” he added.
