Inuvik to Tuk highway halfway complete
Late freeze and delay in obtaining equipment caused a slow start
Evan Kiyoshi French
Northern News Services
Friday, June 5, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Around 60 km of gravel highway remains to be laid in order to officially connect Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk by all-weather road, according to the territorial government's director of highways and marine services.
Kevin McLeod, director highways and marine services for the Department of Transportation, said around 60 kms remain in a highway build connecting Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk, during a news conference in Yellowknife last week. - Evan Kiyoshi French/NNSL photo |
Speaking at a news conference in Yellowknife June 1, Kevin McLeod - who is also the director of the Inuvik-Tuk highway project - said despite a late freeze up which caused a delay of four weeks last fall, construction crews working on the 120-km stretch are on track to have the road open
by the fall of 2017.
"We have completed about 65 km of the 120.4 (km)," said McLeod.
"To date, the contractor has hauled and placed a little over two million cubic metres of material."
Work during the first year of construction was delayed while the crews waited for specialized heavy equipment to be built by Caterpillar in Alabama, said McLeod. They managed to move just under one million cubic metres of material from gravel pits during 69 days of work, falling short of their target of 1.8 million cubic metres, he said.
Over the course of their second season, the contracted road builder - a joint venture between E. Gruben's Transport and Northwind Industries - added seven trucks to increase capacity and make up for lost time. They're seven km shy of the target according to the timeline laid out in the contract, he said.
Work on the northern section - where the ground is flat - has gone smoother than in the south where undulating terrain has meant the crews have had to use more material to level out the valleys between the hills, he said.
"We average about 40 thousand cubic metres (of fill material) per kilometre but in the south ... they were in close to 60,000 to 70,000."
McLeod said work has ended for the season to allow the completed sections to dry out and be graded.
In the coming season they hope to move more than two million cubic metres of material to connect the two sections.
"Season three, which will start in November and go until April of 2016, we'll see work on 53.5 km to close the gap," he said.
The project has a budget of $299 million - with $200 million coming from Ottawa and $99 million coming from the GNWT, said McLeod.
He added there are two test sections where new techniques are being employed to account for potential climate change.
At a culvert at kilometre 22 they have installed plastic pipes in place of steel ones in the hopes that the plastic will be a better insulator.
"We want the air to flow through and to keep the embankment cool," he said.
Around kilometre 80 they have used geotextile material to encase layers of earth around a steep valley, said McLeod.
Geotextiles are a type of fabric used to control soil movement around engineering projects. A team from the University of Manitoba developed and is monitoring the site to see if the technique will prevent the road from sinking.
"Our normal layers (of earth) are two to 300 mm think. We've used geotextile to wrap the layers," he said.
"(The University of Manitoba) put instrumentation throughout to track soil pressure, water pressure and strain gauge to track movement."
Transport Canada funded $670,000 to build the test sections, said McLeod.
At the peak of construction more than 600 people had jobs on the construction team manning 56 pieces of heavy equipment, said McLeod.
He said 120 people received training and of that 70 received specialized simulator training to drive rock trucks, graders and front-end loaders.
He said 30 to 40 more people will be trained for next season.
Mervin Gruben, vice-president of E. Gruben's Transport and director of EGT Northwind, said work went smoothly once it began during the second season of construction.
"The first year was the hardest because you had to get all the equipment up and started right from scratch," he said.
"But we had a much better year this year for sure. The biggest problem is on the south side. There's a lot of valleys and ditches that took a lot of gravel and slowed them down a bit."
He said the second season was delayed for lack of an ice road.
Entrance to a gravel pit near Inuvik was impossible at the planned start date because the late freeze meant their access-ice road didn't exist yet.
He said he doesn't anticipate a similar delay this year because the start date isn't so early in the year.
"We're planning to start hauling in December," he said.
