A section of Range Road 13 north of Township Road 264 and south of Big Hill Springs Road will be closed from Oct. 5 to Oct. 7 to allow City of Airdrie engineering crews to repair the roadway.
“”That stretch of roadway has essentially failed on us,” said Municipal Engineering Techologist Ken Velcic. “It’s about 100 metres from shoulder to shoulder. Our public works guys have been patching it over the last two years just to keep it functioning and now it’s a full rebuild, which means we’re going to dig it all out, right down to clay and rebuild it.”
Velcic said the entire stretch of road will need to be closed, Oct. 5 to 7 so the work can be completed in a quick and efficient fashion.
“Because there’s only two lanes of travel there and then the shoulder, there’s no opportunity for detour (in the immediate vicinity),” he said. “We asked the contractor if he could build it half at a time and he said he could but it would be two weeks for construction and more costly and less safe because he’d be working from centre line out.”
“He can get this done in three days and people can’t drive through there so it will be safer,” he added. “Two weeks from now we could be in frost and snow and we just didn’t want to risk it.”
The cost to complete the road repair is $110,000. Velcic said the funding comes from a surplus in the Capital Roads Program.
“We didn’t plan to do it this year, but there was room in the budget because we saved some money on the tender process. The winning bid came in lower than our budget so we were able to squeeze this in under this year’s budget,” he explained.
The City will set up detours that will direct traffic south on 8 Street and then west on Highway 566. Access to Range Road 13 north of Township Road 264 will be restricted to local residents. Traffic signs will be set up to help direct traffic and Velcic said residents are asked to obey all signs and speed limits.
Velcis said the roadway likely failed because of the way it was initially constructed.
“When they built those roads, they literally just built a big berm out of loam and put the gravel on top, so we’re fully expecting to peel the asphalt back and find top soil,” he explained. “(The road is) seeing more traffic than it ever did and now sections are going to fail.”
The City of Airdrie is responsible for this section of roadway as it was added to the city boundaries during the annexation in March of 2012.
“These are things, certainly, management and council will have to look at,” Velcic said. “We have kilometres of gravel road and kilometres of paved road that we never had before. These roads just recently became ours so we haven’t yet had a chance to run an evaluation (of them).
Every four- to- five years, through the Pavement Management Program, City crews run a machine that is like an x-ray over the roads that can tell them what the structure of the road is, Velcic said. This allows staff to predict which roadways are going to fail. The dates for the next program have yet to be set, according to Velcic.
The section of road will be rebuilt using modern techniques, according to Velcic. The existing loam will be removed until a clay base is reached. Then a foot of large gravel will be laid followed by four to six inches of crushed gravel and four to six inches of asphalt. This will provide a stronger, more durable foundation for the road.
Velcic said he expects work on the road to continue through the night on Oct. 7 but the roadway should reopen on Oct. 8, baring any weather-related delays.
