Nearly three seasons have passed and residents in the Dalum area are still bumping down the Taylor Siding Road hoping not to fall through.
The Mail brought its readers a story last November about a hazard on the road. There is a major cave-in near where southbound Highway 841 becomes eastbound Highway 569 in Wheatland County. At that time, the road had already been crumbling since last September.
Junior Jensen lives near the highway and says while there has been some work, the situation has not changed much in the last 10 months.
“They have been dumping gravel and they get it up to grade in the day, and it falls six feet down in the night,” said Jensen. “It’s awfully ugly.”
He explains there has not been much action on fixing the road until this summer. Despite efforts to build the road up, it continued to slough off. He has learned that engineers have been called in to revisit how to properly fix the road.
“They are putting it (gravel) on top, packing it in and it keeps pushing the mud out the bottom,” said Jensen.
Construction engineer for Alberta Transportation Dennis Grace told The Mail this summer the department struggled to secure a contractor to make the fix in light of the flooding. When they were able to have crews come out and work on the road, their efforts were unsuccessful.
“That road has been sliding a little bit for years,” said Grace. "We had an engineering firm look at it, and based on surface observations, looked at the least expensive plan and went with it. They did some repairs on the road, but it showed movement after, so we are going to modify our plan.”
This summer crews have attempted to rebuild a section of Taylor Siding Road without success. The Mail first reported the road was sloughing in November of last year.
He said they have stopped work on the area to observe and come up with a plan.
“Hopefully by fall we’ll have something in place and finish it off by fall.”
Grace explains one of the difficulties with repairing some of these out of the way roads is they don’t know the construction history and how it was built.
“You are guessing on a lot of this stuff,” he said.
“It's frustrating, you always want to do things 100 per cent but when you try with what you see on the surface, you can’t always get it right the first time.”
The highway is classified as a resource road, there are a couple of oil and gas based installations along the road, making it relatively busy.
“There must be 40 b-trains of oil coming along the road every day,” said Jensen.
With the coming of harvest season the traffic will be even greater.
Jensen is hopeful the recent efforts will pay off.
“The good news is they are going to have another look at it, but we know it is going to take that much longer to get it fixed,” said Jensen. “But now we can maybe get it fixed right because it was just patchwork before.”
