August 23, 2007

Roadbuilding

Road builders pull together to repair British Columbia’s Barnett Highway in a hurry

JEAN SORENSEN

correspondent

Burnaby, B.C.

At the height of the construction industry’s paving season, a B.C. contractor hit an oil pipeline, spewing 1,400 barrels of gooey oil onto Inlet Drive, a road linking Hastings Street to the Barnett Highway, and surrounding roads and houses.

But, in just over a day, B.C.’s road builders were able to pull together, freeing up men and equipment, to reopen the busy commuter highway.

“We got the call about 6:30 p.m. the day of the (July 24) spill,” says estimator Dennis Recksiedler of Columbia Bitulithic Ltd. “They wanted to know if I had a milling machine available.”

The pipeline had been nicked about six hours earlier but vacuum trucks rushed in to pull excess oil from sewers and drain areas.

The four-lane highway covered in oil posed an environmental and safety threat for motorists passing through the affected one-third of a kilometer of roadway.

The immediate problem in a nutshell: Cusano Contracting had ruptured the pipe on the east side of the four-lane entrance to the Barnett Highway and the City of Burnaby wanted to get the two west-side lanes reopened to traffic as soon as possible as it linked thousands of commuters to the Tri-Cities (Port Moody, Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam) and areas nearby such as Ioco.

CB’s Derek Sanderson, construction manager, took over the project moving the machine and men onto the site. They worked through the night removing two to three inches of the existing pavement on the two lanes.

Usually the industry doesn’t have equipment available at the drop of a hat, says Recksiedler, but the decision was made to help even though it put extra pressure on scheduling work the next day.

CB general manager Jorn Graugaard said after Sanderson visited the site, he pulled together a crew on standby including a milling machine, three workers and half a dozen trucks and drivers.

By 10 p.m. they were all on site removing the two westbound lanes of oil-saturated pavement. They finished off the bulk of the job by 4 a.m. and CB had to leave to move to another job site and was unable to finish the paving. Graugaard said the men where also tired and had been on standby during the evening and then worked all night.

Chris Bowcott, president and owner of Tarmac Grinding, received the call at 5:30 a.m. that Wednesday. Another milling machine was needed.

“We had our crews and equipment on site by 10 a.m.,” he says, ready to assist by finishing off some of the milling and helping with joining of the new pavement to the old. Work started at noon as the asphalt pavement profiler went to work touching up areas. “We were there until 8:30 p.m. that night,” he said.

Bowcott credits his men for jumping in to help, but also credits a client’s willingness to put his job on hold in light of the need to reopen the highway.

Franco Pastro, of Winvan Paving Ltd, received a call from the city early Wednesday morning looking for paving options and estimates. Following a site inspection, three rollers and a paving machine were moved by early afternoon. The 12-man crew assigned had just finished a day’s work at another job site.

Re-paving started at 3 p.m. and by 9:30 p.m. the last man had left.

“You expect to work long days during the summer,” says Pastro, but this was an emergency and the men all pitched in.

Forty-two hours after the accident, the two lanes linking commuter traffic to the Barnett Highway was reopened. The other eastbound lanes still need to be repaired, pending the investigation into the pipeline rupture and subsequent repair.

Accolades really go the men who worked on the roadway, most supervisors say. As Pastro says of his crew: “We have excellent employees – they didn’t balk at doing this.”

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