This morning Highway 1 is closed in the Revelstoke area because of adverse winter road conditions.
If you live in the Columbia-Shuswap region, it’s an all too common occurrence. Yesterday, a six-car pileup between Sicamous and Revelstoke shut down the highway for several hours. The day before that, two people died in an accident between Revelstoke and Golden. Two days before that, one person died just west of Golden when two semi-trailers collided. And a week before that, two people died in a collision between Revelstoke and Craigellachie.
That’s not to mention late November, when parts of the highway were closed for multiple hours four times in a week due to a variety of accidents, including one fatal crash.
READ MORE: Full coverage of all recent Highway 1 accidents around Revelstoke
Today, the road is closed because of extreme avalanche risk and not because of any accident. In all however, six people have died in four collisions between Golden and Sicamous so far this winter. The curving, mostly two-lane stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway causes considerable stress to drivers who take its mountainous path at this time of year.
But it also causes stress for the city located right in the middle of it all.
“The highway, I think it’s all been recognized by everybody in the province, is not up to a proper and safe standard,” says Mark McKee, the city’s mayor.
“Just about everyone in Revelstoke has been affected in one way or another by the Trans-Canada, and when you’re affected it’s usually negative.”
People either travelling to or from Calgary and Banff are often stranded in Revelstoke for hours, sometimes overnight, and the city has gotten used to housing large number of travellers at a moments notice.
READ MORE: Fatal crash near Revelstoke leaves hundreds of travellers stranded
McKee says it takes a toll.
Substantial public dollars have been poured into the highway in the last decade. The provincial government spent approximately $700 million on improvements to Highway 1 between Kamloops and the Alberta border from 2001 to 2012, while the federal government is currently making improvement to parts of the highway that go through national parks.
Yet despite that, challenges remain. A paper prepared last year by members of the Transportation Association of Canada says there are more kilometres of two-lane highway between Kamloops and the Alberta border on Highway 1 than there are from Alberta to the Manitoba/Ontario border. They also say from 2005 to 2012, there were an average of 55.5 unplanned closures from Salmon Arm to Revelstoke each year.
McKee isn’t hoping for any one quick fix for the highway, but rather general improvements on how it is managed. He’s hoping to get the provincial and federal governments at the table together to discuss solutions.
“When new accidents happen, how fast do people get on the scene to do their job so that cleaning up the debris and the highway and opening up to traffic can happen? It’s taking too long to get these people on the scene and get the highway reopened,” he says.
“It’s the maintenance, it’s the quality of the highway and it’s the upgrades. If we could fix a little bit of everything, we’re going to be seeing less accidents, and the highway closed less often and for shorter durations.”
For now, all McKee can do is continue to lobby for improvements and wait—both for action by governments, and another accident.
“This is going to happen again, the community knows it’s going to happen again,” he says.
“We’ll step up. That’s the type of community we have, but I can tell you they’re getting tired of seeing the same thing year after year.”
– With files from Jordan Armstrong