The Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure held an open house Wednesday, Nov. 15, to answer questions about the Hodgson and Dog Creek slides impacting the Williams Lake area.
Several information boards were placed around the Gibraltar Room and members of the project team were on hand to answer questions.
One of the information boards noted the surface area of the Hodgson Slide is 55 hectares or nine times the size of the Williams Lake Stampede Grounds.
Another showed the volume of material - soil, rock and debris - moved as a result of the Hodgson and Dog Creek slides is 36 million cubic metres, enough to fill nearly 14 BC Places.
Greg Bruce, MoTI director for the Cariboo Road Recovery Project, said presently some ditching and culvert replacement is underway in the area between Dog Creek Road and Hodgson Road to direct water down near Wotzke Drive and eventually head it towards Highway 20.
“We are working with the city to do the drainage works through the bottom end,” he said.
The next phase will be to go into the neighbourhoods above that area.
“Before we can introduce water into that corridor we need to do the bottom end first,” he explained. “It’s been a considerable length of time since anything like that was undertaken up there and we are really just establishing drainage throughout that neighbourhood.”
The ditching and culvert work will be completed in a couple of weeks.
Other work has included drilling 30 boreholes as deep as 74 metres and installing 25 pieces of instrumentation in the boreholes to measure movement and groundwater pressure. Information gathered will help determine what should be done next.
Bruce said he anticipates additional drainage design works will occur next construction season.
Terra Ridge, a senior housing complex on Wotzke Drive, is within the Hodgson Slide area.
It has been under a state of local emergency since Sept. 29 due to potential land slippage and people living in four of the 80 units have had to move out.
Bruce said his team met with Terra Ridge residents for an hour before the public open house, recognizing that there are some very personal stories and obvious impacts for the people living there.
“We wanted to give them a bit of space on their own without the rest of the public attending,” he said. “They asked lots of questions. It was a good turnout.”
Information about the Cariboo Road Recovery Project is available on the gov.bc.ca/cariboo website and Bruce encouraged the public to check for current information.
“We want to be transparent with the public and this meeting was part of that,” he said.
READ MORE: City of Williams Lake considers signing Hodgson Landslide Complex MOU
READ MORE: Williams Lake residents impacted by slow-moving slide at Terra Ridge seek answers
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