How to Re-Invent Roads

 

Building highways in British Columbia can bring challenges not always faced in other provinces.  Mountains and snowpack and raging rivers can do that sort of thing.

When, last Wednesday, a massive atmospheric river took down all four of BC's mountain highways and both rail lines it was obvious that engineering standards of the past were no longer acceptable. This is no longer the Holocene. This is the Anthropocene.

You may have head that some of these roads are re-opening. That doesn't mean they're repaired. Temporary, limited traffic routes have been established but fixing the highways will take until 2022, perhaps longer.

The old roads won't return. The new roads will be designed by highway engineers but, this time, the road-builders will be guided by climate scientists.

The Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC), a climate analysis group based at the University of Victoria, projects a nearly fourfold increase in atmospheric rivers hitting western North America by the end of the 21st century and a median precipitation increase of 7 per cent by the 2050s. Regional variations in those projections vary wildly. In short: Sudden, levee-busting rains will be far more frequent.

“What we’re seeing right now bears out and validates a lot of the research that has been going on,” said Markus Schnorbus, lead hydrologist with PCIC. “Bouncing from one extreme to the next is a hallmark of climate change. Our historic experience will have no bearing on what we’ll experience in the future.”

The past will no longer define the future.

“We started to realize that if you only use historical data, you’re always going to be behind the game. We needed to use future data,” said Ian Pilkington, the province's chief engineer.

Based on the modelling, engineers might integrate bigger culverts and higher bridge decks to accommodate greater water volumes. To prevent instability in water-logged hills, designs might call for shallower slopes and drainage blankets, permeable material that controls seepage. And roadbeds can be armoured with boulders to prevent the kind of river erosion that washed away sections of the Coquihalla this week.

“What we’re seeing right now bears out and validates a lot of the research that has been going on,” said Markus Schnorbus, lead hydrologist with PCIC. “Bouncing from one extreme to the next is a hallmark of climate change. Our historic experience will have no bearing on what we’ll experience in the future.”

Comments

  1. TrailblazerNovember 22, 2021 at 10:31 PM

    Yes our highways will have to be re invented but do not lose sight of the fact that our fertile lands and those of other nations depend upon seasonal flooding.
    Think Nile valley and Bangladesh.
    We need to re invent our farming practices so as to protect farm animals as much as we need to upgrade our road systems.
    Subdivision building must stop in these areas which have been manipulated by the real estate industry.
    In retrospect the Campbell Clarke years have come back to haunt us.

    TB

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibNovember 23, 2021 at 7:47 AM

      I think the Nile is a poor example, TB. The flooding there is needed to support agriculture along the river's banks. Floodwaters deliver not only water but also nutrients. Beyond that it's scorching desert.

      The massively overdeveloped Fraser Valley is a mistake that inflicts permanent costs. We allowed the developers to hold sway with our councils and legislature for far too long - in the name of "progress" to be sure.

      It was probably in the mid-90s that the Vancouver Sun had a front page article about an Environment Canada survey that found the Lower Mainland/Fraser Valley had a population three times greater than its ecology could sustain. The answer? More development.

      Greed runs this province. It was also the default operating system of the BC Libs. That's how Christie Clark found herself not once but twice plastered on the front page of the New York Times.

      Delete
  2. Northern PoVNovember 23, 2021 at 8:28 AM

    "We needed to use future data,"

    A ministry for the future, eh? Neat idea.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

Image
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy.  Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal.  We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more