It’s expected to soon be smooth sailing on Eagle Bay Road.
Darcy Mooney, the Shuswap Emergency Program’s emergency operations centre director, reports that the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure informed him Eagle Bay Road is expected to be restored to a two-lane, paved roadway by the end of the week.
Mooney said the road repair work has been going well, and traffic control is continuing for a couple of days until hydro seeding and paving is complete.
As of Sunday, April 30, the equivalent of about 160 tandem truckloads of materials had been hauled in to replace the hole gouged in the road by a water and debris flow on Thursday afternoon, April 27.
The washout in the 6,000 block of Eagle Bay Road was reported about 3 p.m., when a torrent of water rushed down the hillside, taking out the road and carrying trees, rocks and a culvert with it.
Marc Zaichkowsky, a captain with the Tappen-Sunnybrae Fire Department who was one of a 14-person construction crew stranded at their job site by the washout, reported at the time that no houses appeared to be affected. However, he said, water flowing down a drainage ditch had washed onto a property, knocking a house’s propane tank loose.
Although the Shuswap Emergency Program stated 318 residences sit on the east side of the washout, many of them are seasonal so no accurate estimate of how many people were stranded was known.
Resident Terry Clark reported Thursday that the RCMP went door-to-door in the area near the washout and confirmed that all at-risk homes, particularly the one with the damaged propane tank, were not occupied at the time.
The only access around the washout was by boat on Shuswap Lake. For medical emergencies, a helicopter could also be employed.
A comfort centre was set up by the Shuswap Emergency Program at the Eagle Bay Community Hall for residents affected.
After surveying the scene above the site by helicopter Thursday evening, MOTI crews were reported to be on scene early Friday morning, constructing a detour for stranded residents. By 5 p.m. Friday, the one-lane detour was in place.
Work on repairing the road has continued by MOTI since then.
MOTI communications staff say they cannot respond to media requests for information until after the provincial election, so it’s not known whether the cause of the April 27 flooding has been determined.