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Rain continues to cause problems

Hardly a day goes by without a few drops of rain, but on the heavier days like the non-stop downpour on June 9, county and town roads, and a few homes and businesses, are feeling the brunt of it.
Traffic on Highway 44 near Township Road 610 was reduced to one-lane for a good part of the day June 16 after the ground around a culvert gave way following heavy rain.
Traffic on Highway 44 near Township Road 610 was reduced to one-lane for a good part of the day June 16 after the ground around a culvert gave way following heavy rain.

Hardly a day goes by without a few drops of rain, but on the heavier days like the non-stop downpour on June 9, county and town roads, and a few homes and businesses, are feeling the brunt of it.

In Westlock County, drivers are having a hard time crossing the trenches that are actually county roads.

“Our roads are very important for commerce and we know that, but the whole weather pattern has got to give us a break,” said county reeve Don Savage.

“We have 11 routes and 11 graders and all the guys are ready to go, just let it dry up a little bit. It’s just the way it is.”

He asked the public for a bit of understanding given that the grader operators are at the mercy of the weather.

“You just have to slow down and get to highway or whatever road that’s a little better. We have hot and cold areas. Some roads are very good and other roads, they’ve just received a lot of springtime traffic from farmer’s doing their thing — they have a right to farm — and consequently, they’re pretty beat up.”

The ongoing moisture has prevented the roads from firming up and for the county to perform maintenance.

County CAO Leo Ludwig explained that much of the county’s more than 2,100 kilometres of road are elevated graded roads.

“They were built 60, 70, 80 years ago and how you built the road was you scraped the dirt up from both sides — the trees first and then the dirt — and then you put some gravel on top,” he said. “In the 1940s when the large farmer had a one ton, those roads were adequate, but that’s not the way it is today.”

With that type of sub-structure in the road battling the heavier and larger equipment nowadays, he said the roads have no tensile strength to hold the gravel on top. That coupled with hydraulic pressures from the water pushes the dirt and mud up through the top of the road.

“Because when it’s wet, it expands and it has to go somewhere,” he added.

To mitigate that, the county has put in money into the county’s shoulder pull program and looking at creating a road rehabilitation program.

“Where you have your worst spots that tend not to dry out, we need to go in and do a rebuild,” he said. “So we take those old rotting stumps and branches and roots and black dirt out from under the road and put a proper clay base in and a gravel top. But that’s a very time consuming and expensive process.”

Town issues

At Westlock’s town council meeting last Monday, Coun. Clem Fagnan said it was time to do something about the flooding in areas west of town on 93 Ave. and 110A St. and north.

He specifically pointed out a ditch along the utility right of way that is going nowhere — except right into a local business.

“Standing out in the rain — the last rain in August and again last Friday — watching the water go, I don’t think we need an engineer to tell us we have big problem there,” he said. “We have a ditch that takes water and it goes right into that shop. There’s a big hill at that property there and the water does not go to that hill, it goes to that ditch.”

Fagnan said regardless of whether the ditch is on private land or town property, it should be filled in or redirected so it drains elsewhere.

“There was two feet of water in the shop this time and the ditch was full.”

Other problem areas he observed were along 93 Ave. going north and 90 Ave. and 100 St. west.

“If we have surpluses, we should be putting it towards our drainage system,” he said.

Operations director Don Hamilton said the department took four sewer complaints of back-ups in homes, but nothing really for town infrastructure damage. “I’ve haven’t seen anything excessive except for a lot of granulars entering into our catch basins again, but that’s mainly the runoff from little lanes,” Hamilton said.

Town CAO Dean Krause said they’re aware of some areas Fagnan mentioned but they would review them and verify his concerns.

“In the past year we’ve done some major ditching in the industrial area,” Krause indicated. “One of our major problems is it all runs through one ditch going north. We did one quarter section last year where we cleaned out the ditch and moved the weir so that it flows better. We still have to do another quarter section north of the quarter west to improve that flow.”

Krause added that council recently approved work on the Old Pickardville Road and just started the storm and water management plan, which will involve assessing the source of the water flow.

“Our historical storm water management, for many municipalities, was through ditches and so forth,” he said. “It stands today to create storm ponds that hold the water in excessive rain and then do a slow release from the pond so your ditching and underground system can handle it.”

As for flooding in basements, he said the culprit is fresh water getting into the sanitary system, and though the town is building a sanitary modelling system, the cause has yet to be determined.

He hoped by the end of this year to have an overall plan of what needs to be done.

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