Rain causes rockslide on Burnaby highway

Heavy rain caused a rockslide late Saturday evening on Burnaby’s Barnet Highway, the city’s roads and drainage manager tells CityNews.

The slide happened halfway between Bayview Drive and Takeda Drive around 11 p.m., the City of Burnaby’s manager of roads and drainage told CityNews.

“We found a small lot of debris that is scattered across both lanes of the eastbound traffic on a highway, and there’s a mixture of sizes of stones.,” Adam Quan told CityNews. “So we just weren’t quite sure what the extent of it was.”

Quan says a geotechnical engineer has reviewed the wire mesh in place along the stretch and says it is still intact and there is no risk to more failures.

“It was simply the large volume of water that came down and destabilized some of the smaller bits underneath, and that kind of came down the underside of the wire mesh and then kind of slammed against the wall and some of it spilled over,” he said. “So (the engineer) indicated that there’s no further risk at this time.”

Both eastbound lanes were closed until Sunday afternoon.

Quan says this is the first notable weather-mudslide incident of the year.

No injuries have been reported.

With files from David Nadalini.

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