Sheri Bennett stands outside her truck in Keremeos while en route to Surrey, B.C., via the Crowsnest Highway 3, on Dec. 7.Caillum Smith/The Globe and Mail
The Crowsnest Highway winds its way between British Columbia’s Fraser Valley and southeast Alberta, tracing the route of a gold mining trail blazed more than 150 years ago by British colonists. The two mostly undivided lanes of Highway 3, as it is also known, make pretzel-like mountain turns. In places, the road rises more than 1,000 metres high, offering a steady stream of tourists dazzling views of B.C.’s rugged geography each summer.
In winter, it’s a highway that demands caution and patience. But those two qualities have seemingly been in short supply along the route’s westernmost portion since last month, when a historic storm buffeted southern B.C. Major sections of the Trans-Canada Highway and the Coquihalla Highway were damaged by flooding and will now be closed for at least another month, leaving Highway 3 as the lone artery for commercial traffic between Western Canada and Metro Vancouver.
Before the storm, the Crowsnest saw an average of 1,850 passenger vehicles and 775 trucks a day, according to the provincial Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure.
Now, its commercial traffic has nearly quadrupled to more than 3,000 trucks a day. This has created a major bottleneck that is putting drivers at risk, challenging provincial and local authorities and creating lasting supply-chain pain for a number of industries across Western Canada during the crucial Christmas season.
Chris Cameron, who drives fruit from Puneet & Brothers Orchards in Osoyoos down Highway 3 at least once a week, said he’s also seeing newer drivers create problems on the route.Caillum Smith/The Globe and Mail
Shortly after the storm, when Highway 3 reopened to commercial trucking and essential travel, two semis had a fiery head-on collision that killed the two drivers and one of their passengers.
BC Highway Patrol Corporal Mike Halskov said it appears that the crash, which closed the highway for 16 hours, was due to icy pavement and the inexperience of out-of-province drivers.
The Crowsnest, Cpl. Halskov warned, is “not for the faint of heart.”
“It has to be treated with respect, especially if you’re not familiar with the route,” he said.
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Sheri Bennett, who has driven trucks since 2004, was about to embark on her sixth post-flood trip on Highway 3 last week. She and her long-time passenger Rollie – a coat-wearing chihuahua who she said was “conceived in a truck and born in a truck” – were transporting juice from Sun-Rype Products Ltd. in Kelowna to a warehouse in the Vancouver suburb of Langley. They had stopped for rest in the small B.C. Interior town of Keremeos.
Usually, she said, transporting goods from Vancouver to Calgary takes 11 hours on the Coquihalla, a much more direct route between Hope and Kamloops with two lanes in each direction and a third on big hills, so slower trucks can climb them safely. A recent trip from Vancouver to Calgary via Highway 3 took her two days.
“This route is a nightmare,” Ms. Bennett said as she stood by her rig enjoying a cigarette.
The danger, she contended, is being exacerbated by the fact that there are many inexperienced truck drivers on the road these days, most of whom get paid by the mile. The slower they go, the less they make.
The provincial transportation ministry says it’s aware of the situation on Highway 3 and has been working with the trucking industry to publicize the need for drivers to slow down.Caillum Smith/The Globe and Mail
Over her VHF radio, the friendly chatter between truckers has turned tense and aggressive in recent weeks as they negotiate Highway 3.
“They’ll say, ‘I don’t care what it is. I’m driving my way. This is my life. You haul your load, I’ll haul mine.’ You got people that pass on double solids, on corners. They’re speeding. They are right up your butt! It’s take your life in your own hands.”
Chris Cameron, who drives fruit from Puneet & Brothers Orchards in Osoyoos down Highway 3 at least once a week, said he’s also seeing newer drivers create problems on the route. The season’s first snow has made conditions more treacherous, he said, in part because the province has not maintained the highway well enough.
“You would think it would be the most stupidly simple and basic thing to do, to just make sure that the steep hills are salted and cleaned – that the brake checks are salted and cleared so that we can pull in and out,” he said. “But no.”
A dashcam video taken along Highway 3 went viral recently. It shows a semi driver screaming past two other transport trucks around a double-lined blind corner on Highway 5a, which flows north out of Highway 3 at Princeton. The BC Highway Patrol is trying to determine who the driver was and which company they were working for.
The provincial transportation ministry says it’s aware of the situation on Highway 3 and has been working with the trucking industry to publicize the need for drivers to slow down. The ministry has been posting photos on social media that show the most treacherous stretches.
Police have stepped up enforcement along the route, talking to truckers about the dangers and turning around up to 10 passenger vehicles a day whose drivers aren’t taking essential trips, according to Paula Cousins, a regional director at the transportation ministry who manages the provincial highway network in the southern Interior.
An AIM Roads snow plough clears off a truck pullout along Hwy 3.Caillum Smith/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Cousins, who grew up in Terrace riding shotgun in her dad’s logging truck as he negotiated back roads twice as steep as Highway 3′s steepest grade (which is 8 per cent), said the ministry is increasing salting and sanding on the route.
“The route functions just fine in normal times. It’s a safe highway and commercial goods do travel on it, but not this many,” she said.
“There’s not a lot we can do if mother nature decides to gift us with another 100 or 200-millimetre rainfall event, but right now conditions are looking positive that that’s not in the cards and we’ll be able to get some of those other key corridors open.”
Having the Trans-Canada and the Coquihalla closed is as grave a situation as if only one major highway was servicing Toronto, according to David Earle, president and chief executive of the BC Truckers Association.
“But spread that out over hundreds of kilometres, through the mountains, in the snow – that’s what we’re dealing with,” he said.
Now that supplies of food, fuel and other basic necessities have stabilized as the emergency recovery wanes, companies across Western Canada can start solidifying plans to get their products to market, Mr. Earle added. But that will take time, he said, and delays in shipments of all kinds are likely as Christmas approaches.
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