After receiving complaints from logging contractors and local residents concerned about the amount of potholes on Babine Lake Road, Lakes District News asked Lakes District Maintenance (LDM) why such a high-traffic road isn’t in better shape.
Currently, there are at least 90 empty logging trucks travelling the road daily.
Cori Funk, LDM’s regional operations manager, said the challenge with maintaining gravel roads such as Babine Lake Road is that, with the amount of precipitation that the Burns Lake area has experienced this fall, the roads become like “mud soup.”
“In the last six weeks, the weather has been mild and we have had precipitation 27 days, amounting to 65.1 millimetres,” he said. “The saturation this causes has not only been a challenge for the Babine Lake Road, but most gravel roads in the area.”
“They have not been able to dry out or freeze up; traffic, especially industrial traffic, does not take long to pound the road out causing potholes to develop quickly,” he continued.
Since Nov. 8, LDM has had a grader working the Babine Lake Road from one end to the other twice. The second pass was completed on Nov. 17.
“During this same time frame, we have added 18 truck loads of gravel to try and improve the ridability for our stakeholders,” added Cori. “We expect that we will have a grader working on it again sometime this week.”