Road work continues through July

At the base of a small-but-steep valley, near the bottom of Cranberry Road, a mostly hidden waterway runs beneath Salt Spring Island’s busiest roadway. 

And even in the middle of the Fulford-Ganges Road Project — the most significant road improvement effort here in decades — the technical work taking place in that little valley stands out, according to Northridge Excavating Ltd. project manager Bob Mitchell. We watch from above as an excavator painstakingly carves its way to the bottom, digging a temporary road into the brush and dirt while it goes — and loading debris into an increasingly bold dump truck as the surface gradually improves.  

At the very bottom, there were robins delightedly hopping around. 

“Thankfully, they love this part,” chuckled Mitchell, as we watched the birds stuff themselves with worms and grubs from the disturbed soil. “I was worried when I saw the first one, but we had our biologist here and he said, ‘No no, she’s here for the food!’” 

The Fulford-Ganges Road Project is a $22.9- million effort, chiefly focused on a 1.6-kilometre stretch Ministry of Transportation and Transit (MoTT) officials have said will include resurfacing, widening and paved shoulders for pedestrians and cyclists. Two months ago, while road work continued, the company’s contracted registered professional biologist held the excavator back from the valley, as both a robin and woodpecker had started nests there.   

That postponed the literal high-water point of the project’s subsurface stormwater improvements until the environmental all-clear was given last week. But the scheme to insert a 1.4-metre diameter pipe beneath Salt Spring’s busiest road — without further snarling traffic — is now fully underway. 

“There’s a very small culvert down there,” said Mitchell. “It’s dry-stacked rock; it looks a little like a Roman aqueduct. The new pipe going in, when the next big rain comes, should really help protect the road from washing out.” 

After passing beneath Fulford-Ganges Road, stormwater runoff from that hillside eventually reaches the ocean next to the sailing club’s dock. The delay shifted work into what turned out to be a good time to dig, Mitchell said, because there’s less rain to wash exposed soil downhill. 

The temporary road to the valley bottom is being built entirely to accommodate the massive pipe-ramming machine that will “trenchlessly” hammer a new horizontal hole through without having to stop traffic above. With apologies to the neighbourhood for the sound, he said, that ramming should take about 12 days, with crews approved by the ministry to work long hours — including Saturdays and Sundays. 

“But then afterwards, everything [in the valley] gets restored,” said Mitchell. “There will be biologists working with landscapers making sure we don’t ruin any birds’ lives.” 

In recent weeks — “after apologizing to my family,” he chuckled — Mitchell has spent every day on-island, wrangling crews and responding quickly to changes on the ground. 

“Usually, my job is to plan two months in advance, and make sure all the pieces are there for management on site to handle things,” said Mitchell. “But it’s been helpful to be here. I’m all over Ganges with the radio, telling the traffic controllers where cars are, when we need to clear emergency vehicles through or whatever’s happening.” 

That sometimes means making a call to shut down work, he added, when traffic gets backed up too far in either direction — and sometimes the only way to clear that is to clear his own crews off the roadway. 

“Like at four o’clock on a Tuesday, traffic was too much,” said Mitchell, “So I shut it down, said ‘we’re off the road for the day, that’s it.’ That’s just to keep things moving.” 

The road construction process has included a pulverizing stage that has saved a lot of trucking, Mitchell said; as it moves along, the machine churns down almost 16 inches, turning the existing road into a mix of base materials crews can flatten and top with new asphalt.  

“And then we’re also using it to do fills in other parts of the road, because it’s actually getting quite a bit wider,” said Mitchell. “It’s a good savings for everybody to take this material out and push it off the side and compact it.” 

Every square inch of the road is then tested for soft spots, he said, by rolling weight onto the compacted surface and measuring for deflection. Sometimes there are surprises; Mitchell said they’d unearthed almost 200 metres of old wood stave pipe about four feet below the surface. 

“So, we had to dig all that out and put gravel back in,” he said. “That added on two days, just that 200 metres.” 

And work on the short unfinished section just above Seaview Avenue was paused after some initial pulverizing unearthed other sub-grade issues, Mitchell said. They’re awaiting an engineer’s design to continue. 

“We run into this sort of thing all the time,” said Mitchell, “because that’s what digging underground is — you just don’t know what’s under there.” 

The next stretch of paving, between Beddis and Cranberry roads, is tentatively scheduled for July 24-25, Mitchell said, with work on Fulford-Ganges Road continuing through the end of the month — and the congestion, mostly from single-lane alternating traffic zones, will look familiar. When paving is underway, he said, it’s harder to send many cars at a time around the slow-moving asphalt machine. 

“Paving days are really bad for traffic,” he said, “because we have to have such a long zone; that’s why we’ve been putting those days up on the message boards.” 

And while Fulford-Ganges Road improvements at Beddis Road are significant — Mitchell said in addition to a realignment, much of that intersection’s approach will be raised by as much as two feet to improve sightlines — crews will do their best to keep people moving. He recommends islanders not attempt to avoid queues at either end by going around, as it causes greater slowdown while cars merge back onto Fulford-Ganges Road. 

By August, Mitchell said, islanders will still see crews at work on driveways and minor intersections, but he expects the traffic impacts on Fulford-Ganges Road will decrease significantly. 

“Believe me, we’re not just out here lollygagging,” said Mitchell. “We don’t want to be out here any longer than we have to, either. But it’s going to be a really nice road.”