Coquihalla Highway reconstruction complete 2 years after devastating floods
Posted November 15, 2023 11:00 am.
Last Updated November 15, 2023 6:26 pm.
The repairs to fix the Coquihalla Highway 5 are complete after the devastating 2021 November floods wiped out more than a handful of bridges on the province’s major highway.
In an update Wednesday, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MoTI) says the highway’s Flood Recovery work is finished after 17 months.
It says over 500,000 hours of work went into reconstructing the highway and its bridges, whilst it also planted 4,500 extra trees and shrubs along the way.
The highway was decimated during an atmospheric river storm that began on Nov. 13, 2021 and lasted for two days.
A series of massive rain storms barrelled into B.C., causing landslides and catastrophic flooding that not only wiped out that highway but also washed away railways and covered large tracts of the Fraser Valley in water.
Five people were killed in the storms near Lillooet, with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and damages occurring, including livestock and crops in the hard-hit Sumas Prairie, as farmland was inundated by water from the overflowing Sumas and Nooksack rivers.
Approximately 15,000 hectares of land were impacted on the former lake bed, with 1,100 properties under evacuation order or alert.
The MoTI says as part of resiliency efforts to the newly reconstructed bridges, it has also extended some bridge lengths to allow for the possibility of extra water flow, increased pile foundations — with the longest being dug 15 storeys into the ground, and has included more than 3,900 truckloads of Rip Rap armouring around the bridges’ pile footings.
The six bridge spans are now finished at Bottletop Bridge, 50 kilometres south of Merritt, Jessica Bridge, 20 kilometres north of Hope, and the Juliet Bridge, 53 kilometres south of Merritt which was completed earlier this year.
“Climate-resilient highways are crucial for British Columbia. The province has improved infrastructure to handle more frequent extreme-weather events in the future,” said Rob Fleming, transportation minister.
“Today, we are honouring the efforts of British Columbians who worked to rebuild after the atmospheric river event, two years ago. Thank you to the Nlaka’pamux communities, Silyx Nation, Peters First Nation and Yale First Nation along with their monitors, for their support through the washout and rebuild process; and to the many contractors, unions, ministry and road-maintenance staff who worked to rebuild this piece of highway that is so important to the movement of goods in our province.”
The province says two of three bridge replacements along Highway 1 are “underway” at Nicomen and Falls Creek, with the Tank Hill Bridge construction expected to start in 2024.
