Residents of rural Harcourt, N.B., are fed up with the poor condition of Emerson Road and Cails Mills Road.
The spring thaw has turned the provincial roads into mudslides filled with deep ruts, with even four-wheel-drive vehicles struggling to get through.
“What if something happens to one of my little kids?” resident Brandon Astles said.
“A rescue vehicle has got to get here. There’s no ifs, ands or buts — somebody has got to get here,” he said on Tuesday.
Astles, a mechanic, is trying to establish an auto repair shop out of his home on Emerson Road.
He was hoping to open this spring, but says the road conditions have made that impossible, as simply driving on the road has damaged residents’ vehicles.
“I don’t know how or if I could expect somebody to travel up and down the Emerson Road the way it is to get any sort of repairs done,” he said.
Longtime Emerson Road resident Fred Young said the road conditions often add up to costly repairs on his truck.
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“Two weeks ago I had to put all new ball joints in the front of this truck and did a new brake job on it and now the back brakes are worn out again. That was two weeks,” Young said.
Young said the road conditions were better when he built his home in 1979 than they are now.
He said people get stuck driving through the mud “quite often.”
“It’s time, people are getting fed up. It’s not hard to see why,” he said.
Becca Proulx moved to nearby Cains Mills Road from London, Ont., last autumn.
She said if she had known the road conditions were this bad, she wouldn’t have purchased property in Harcourt.
She’s concerned that the 25 families who live on the two roads won’t have timely access to first responders for the two months that the roads are muddy.
She fears the roads will only get repaired after tragedy strikes.
“That’s the only way something is going to get done,” she said.
“There is going to be an issue where we need emergency services and they’re not able to get in instead of being pre-emptive and fixing the problem before that happens.”
The provincial government is currently in the process of finalizing the list of projects for the summer 2023 maintenance program.
A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure told Global News in an emailed statement that they use traffic information to determine which provincially managed roads should be paved.
A traffic study will be done on Emerson Road in late spring or early summer of 2023 to determine if it meets the criteria to be paved.
The statement also read that the province plans on grading the roads “as soon as weather permits.”
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