UPDATE 4:30 p.m. Sunday: Highway 4 continued to operate with single-lane alternating traffic at the site of a washout about five kilometres east of the Ucluelet Junction, DriveBC reported.
UPDATE 10:30 p.m. Saturday: Highway 4 has reopened to single-lane alternating traffic.
The main highway to Ucluelet and Tofino could be reopened Saturday night, after being cut off by a torrent of water that scoured out the road.
Highways crews are on the scene trying to deal with the washout, which was at least two metres deep on Friday, Ucluelet Mayor Dianne St. Jacques said today. They hope to have the road open again by 10:30 tonight.
It occurred on Highway 4 about five kilometres from the Ucluelet Junction.
The highway started failing about a week ago in the wake of extra-heavy rain in an area used to plenty of precipitation, she said. Part of the highway broke off on Friday. Traffic was travelling in single-lane only but then was completely shut down.
St. Jacques is taking the situation in good humour.
“I hope the rest of the world survives being cut off from us,” she said with a laugh today.
Highway crews were considering their options. One possibility is to clear brush near the washout and bring in gravel to create a temporary road, she said.
Another is to install signs on an old logging road that locals know about. It cuts back onto the highway.
But St. Jacques does not want people using the logging road until highways has approved that. It has plenty of intersections and it would be easy for someone to lose their way.
Crews are concentrating on the highway, she said.
“They are working on it frantically. They hope to have it open by end of day today, or tomorrow.”
She is not aware of any concern in that community.
“This is the west coast. We are used to this kind of drama.”
“Nobody’s worrying about it at the moment. They are out and about doing their thing. They are able to travel, of course, back and forth into the park and down to Tofino and back to us again, so life is OK.”
Asked about tourists, who often visit the west coast during winter weather, she said that hasn’t been a problem.
“I’m a general manager at a hotel property here. Most of our people came in yesterday. The weekend folks come in Friday afternoon and they leave Sunday.”
She expects by then that either the one-way gravel route or the detour through the bush will be available.
This is the first time that St. Jacques has seen a washout on the highway.
“It is a bit of a mystery, that’s for sure.”
“Our whole region, of course, has had a lot of rain in these last couple of months. It seems like a water course must have been disrupted somehow and changed for it to have happened.”
Tofino Mayor Josie Osborne says the road closure has inconvenienced some people — particularly tourists who have either extended their stay or cancelled their trips — but is otherwise not a cause for concern.
She says having one main access road to the rest of the Island has always posed a challenge, and the community’s emergency planning accounts for that.
Engineers are expected to be assessing the site today, and Osborne says residents are waiting for updates on whether a detour route will be established and when the road will be repaired.
Osborne says she had driven past the site of the washout three times over the past week and could see the hole in the roadway expand.
The community has dealt with occasional road closures due to flooding or a slide in the past, but those usually last only a few hours.
Osborne says the washout is a reminder that big rain events and ongoing erosion can cause significant problems for the roadways in the region.
“Although we focus a lot on major events like earthquakes or big disasters, it’s much more realistic to think of some kind of highway event that might close the road for several days or weeks, and so understanding what alternatives are out there and how prepared we are is something we have to accommodate here,” she says.
At the Common Loaf bakery in Tofino, a staff member who did not want to be named said that supplies were not an issue.
“I talked to a couple of customers too and they said: ‘Oh it’s nothing because it has just been a couple of days.’”
In any case, there is the old logging road that people can use, although “it has quite a few potholes,” she said. It takes about an hour to detour on that road.
