Council asks questions on road and infrastructure challenges of late in community

The late stages of Monday's City Council session became a 411 tutorial
from Operations Director Richard Pucci on some of the city's road challenges

The city's infrastructure, gained a short update from Monday's City Council Session with two councillors asking questions of the City's Operations Director Richard Pucci. 

First in line on the night was Councillor Nick Adey, who noting of the recent heavy rains, asked how the city's infrastructure was holding up and if there had been any infrastructure surprises.

Towards those concerns, Mr. Pucci provided an update on the work of city crews in the last few weeks.

"As you know council and the community is aware, we get these heavy rains quite often and there is certain areas that puddle and pond and we have to go and continually clear catch basins. 

But overall after a couple of hours after its rained, a lot of the water has subsided.

It wreaks havoc on our  infrastructure I mean  there's no question about it. 

Our roads are super saturated underneath which creates pumping and breaking down of the top surfaces and now that saturation moves through the different layers, so that creates the undulations and the waviness of the road.

Proper structure once things get rebuilt usually seals that topcoat so that we don't get that, so that is what we're aiming in all of our repairs. 

It just does, it wears everything down but I think our teams are keeping up with it ... "

Councillor Randhawa once again raised the issue of the growing volume of potholes that make for challenging transits along the city's streets. 

On that theme, the Operations Director noted of the ongoing nature of that road repair work

"The weather obviously plays a huge factor in the creation of potholes and then also fixing potholes, so like a day like today is not the best day to do it.

But you know when they get large and you know can damage vehicles we have to go and do what we can even if we know that it's likely going to have to be redone again next week. 

So sometimes were doing it just to have to redo it because we don't want to damage vehicles. But we do note them, there is a number to call for potholes and we get to them as soon as we can.

Our staff has just been over-run with water leaks, sewer leaks and all of that, so we've been triaging that. Taking people off of roads crews and putting them towards other crews to keep up with all of that other critical infrastructure.

But we do, whenever we  have  our opportunity to  fix potholes and there are a lot of them around town we are aware of that"

Those residents wishing to speak to someone at Operations can contact them at 250-624-6795

The tutorial on our road woes can be reviewed from the Council Vide archive starting at the 239minute mark.

Not introduced as a topic at the session was the status of the two large scale waterline projects underway at Crestview and First Avenue East. Those two waterline issues came from the days of the State of Local Emergency in mid December.

With the twin jobs now closing in on two months of work, it may be time for Council to seek out an update on the projects, as well as the tally of the cost to date and when it's anticipated that the two roads will be reopened to the public.

More notes from Monday's Council Session can be explored from our Council Session Archive.

Further background on Operations themes is available from our archive page here.