Crews are working steadily alongside Dog Creek Road in Williams Lake, part of a Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure construction project to rehabilitate the historical Hodgson/Dog Creek Road slide area.
"We are reshaping this area and getting rid of all the old clay-style material - it's totally saturated," said Al Scharien, a contractor with Binnie Construction Services and former long-time MoTI employee, Thursday, Sept. 26.
He was supervising at the site while two excavator operators worked to remove and relocate debris and the driver of a large dump ruck deposited rocks and then waited to haul away some of the debris.
A huge portion of the slide material will be replaced with the rock - one metre thick at the bottom and half-way up to the top it will be half-a-metre thick, he said.
"We have 3,000 metres of rock to place. The rocks came from a quarry out on Mission Road - Onward Quarry."
Many trees were removed at the top and made into firewood, he added.
"We've expanded the area. There were a lot of vertical slopes so we've made them all safe now. And we will put as much rocks as we can up on the slopes," Scharien said.
Crews are trying to remove as much material as possible that slid with the slide and it will all be hauled away because it is "reject" material.
Additionally, a drain is being installed on the left side of the slide as you viewe it from the roadside.
The drain pipe is temporarily on top of the surface right now but it will be installed underneath in the future.
"There is still some water coming down through the site, but not a lot," Scharien explained. "There is some groundwater so we are going to try and bring it over by running the pipe down and hopefully keep the drainage happening and stop it from sliding."
He said there seems to be more water on the one side where the drainage will be installed.
Crews began working at the site on Sept. 16 and Scharien described it as the most active mitigation crews have done so far.
"Equipment is all local," he added. "We probably have three or four companies working. This is just one of the sites, but it is the most active right now. We are working six days a week."
Three monitoring wells installed last year are still in place and the crews have put up protective materials around each one as the work continues.
"They were out checking those wells this week," Scharien said. "Everything is monitored all along."
As he watched the excavators retrieving material he said there is a lot of old material there, and a lot of clay.
"If you look at the bottom you can see blue clay, it's basically impermeable."
There is single lane alternating traffic on Dog Creek Road near the slide with traffic controllers in place.
A spokesperson for the MoTi replied to a request for an interview noting during the provincial election and interregnum period, government is in a caretaker mode and all government of B.C. communications are limited to critical health and public safety information, as well as statutory requirements.
