‘A huge deal’: B.C.’s Coquihalla Highway to reopen to commercial traffic Monday
Global News
Road crews worked around the clock to bring the Coquihalla Highway back online — with restrictions — for Dec. 20, weeks ahead of earlier estimates.
One of British Columbia’s most important transportation routes is set to reopen to commercial vehicles Monday, after suffering major damage in November’s storms.
Road crews worked around the clock to bring the Coquihalla Highway back online — with restrictions — for Dec. 20, weeks ahead of earlier estimates of when it could be safe to drive.
“There’s no possible way to express our thanks enough, not just for the engineering crews, but for those workers who have been working in the cold and the rain and the snow on a high mountain road, literally day and night for a month, to get us back to this point,” B.C. Trucking Association president and CEO Dave Earle said.
“It’s just a huge thank you from our industry.”
The highway will be restricted to commercial vehicles and inter-city buses, and will have sections with reduced lanes and limited speeds. Vehicles will be limited to 60 km/h in two-lane sections and 100 km/h in four-lane sections.
Earle said that it was too early to say how much those limits could affect travel times, but that the Ministry of Transportation had estimated it would add about an hour to trucking times.
B.C.’s main link between the Lower Mainland and the Interior has been closed since suffering extensive damage from multiple slides and washouts following a powerful atmospheric river that hit B.C. in mid-November.
About 20 sites are impacted along the route with about 130 kilometres of the road needing repairs.
