Sea to sky rockslide
Posted August 1, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Olympics, Transportation
As work to clear the rock slide continues, I noted the sensationalist media depicting the world almost coming to an end if you lived in Squamish and Whistler.
Fortunately, there is a scenic route that will take six hours from Vancouver to Whistler - compared to the two hours it would normally take. Implied in this is that the extra four hours of driving will not result in Whistler being cut off from the rest of the civilized world.
I was trying to find political reactions to this event as politicians absolutely love to take unexpected events and twist it around. The NDP transportation critic, Maurine Karagianis, who stated the following from an article in the Vancouver Sun:
“This one is huge. Sixteen thousand tonnes of rock coming down on a busy highway that we expect will have to be almost bumper to bumper traffic for the Olympics in order to get the number of people up there — that’s a catastrophe in the offing,” said Karagianis.
“I think it’s a huge problem, and I think this is another wake-up call,” she added.
“I’d like to hear from the government. What is their contingency plan? Who is taking responsibility for this?”
It’s a legitimate question, although laced with the usual adjectives (”bumper-to-bumper”, “catastrophe”, etc.) - what if a rock slide happens during the 2010 Olympics? Christine Penn (a reader of the Vancouver Sun) noted that a slide in the spring of 1996 and 1990 caused highway closures (the 1990 closure being 12 days long). It is unlikely that a rock slide would happen during the two weeks of the Olympics, but if it did it would seriously impact transportation efforts.
Karagianis begins to lose it with this statement:
In an interview, Karagianis said the government should have long ago planned a contingency route to ensure a slide of this magnitude could not have the potential to cripple the Olympic Games.
“I think the government was short sighted in not ensuring there was more than one entryway into Whistler that was adequate for the public use,” she said, adding that should have been an early consideration in the Olympic plan.
Premier Gordon Campbell puts her back in place with the following statement:
When asked about building an alternative route, Campbell responded: “Right now I would not immediately jump and say we should spend billions more on another road through a national watershed.”
While the risks can be mitigated with rock-bolting and other forms of prevention, the risk cannot be significantly reduced further simply because the routing of the Sea-to-Sky highway is in a geologically ripe location for rock slides. Historically, there was a routing that was more expensive to build that involved going up the Indian Arm, but the government of the day decided to settle for the coastal routing. The yellow line in the map depicts such a routing:
Choosing the coastal route (although much more scenic) inevitably turned out to be a rather short-sighted decision as it permanently leaves open the risk that the highway will be closed for significant periods of time due to slides.
You will notice one other routing on the map, with the red line - going through Garibaldi Park, so it will not happen, but topographically it is the most likely route to Whistler. More likely (and not illustrated) is the so-called “Sasquatch Highway” that would connect Harrison Hot Springs to Pemberton. There is a 4×4 and forest truck logging road that already connects the two areas.
These routes have been explored and are likely in the historical studies commissioned by the Ministry of Transportation, although there is zero chance of them coming to fruition as long as the government continues to upgrade the Sea to Sky highway. The amount of protest would be greater than the magnitude that the Eagleridge Bluffs upgrade generated. It is virtually impossible to build a new road in the Lower Mainland without generating protests. The “Sasquatch Highway” route, however, is a lot more likely to happen as there is already a pre-existing road there.
The contingency plan is likely to pray for no rock slides during the Olympics. The unfortunate reality is that even with a ferry service running from Horseshoe Bay to Squamish, it won’t be able to scale up nearly to the volumes necessary for the Olympics if an event of this magnitude occurred. A realist would just write “no plan” in the report, but since this would be rather politically incorrect, ferries will be discussed. But even if a rock slide occurred, ferries won’t be able to do it - the ultimate contingency plan is to take the long way around to Whistler. In February, I’d bring my tire chains.