Highway could be closed for months

Kelly Hayes & Rachael Kimola CASTANET:

Ministry of Transportation officials say it could be anywhere between a few days or a few months until a portion of Highway 97 is reopened to traffic. A seven kilometre stretch of the highway near Summerland was closed Friday evening after an unstable fissure was discovered by work crews. Highway Minister engineer, Mike Oliver, says the best thing that could happen would be for the fissure to fail as soon as possible. “If that failed on its own we could pick it up tomorrow we could open the road as soon as we could clean it up. That probably won’t happen, that’s very unlikely. The next best case scenario is that the monitoring shows there is no movement. If the monitoring shows that there’s no movement at all after a period of time, perhaps two or three days, we’d be happy to open it to single lane alternating traffic,” says Oliver. He says if that’s the case, ongoing monitoring of the fissure would be needed.

“Unfortunately, there was minor movement noted Sunday night. So it is moving, it is creeping along. The movement we had Sunday night was in the area of 10 millimetres, which doesn’t sound like much, but that’s indicative of the rock mass still moving along.” Oliver says spotters are monitoring the fissure remotely and they are watching for early signs of fissure failure. “We don't want to put people in danger so we are monitoring remotely. There is always an indication of failure beforehand that provides some estimate of time before rocks would reach the road. Usually what that involv