Barriere mayor wants Yellowhead Highway safety concerns addressed by governments

Stamer knows it would be difficult to add more passing lanes with little room for widening on either side of the highway. He’s hoping the region can get some government funding for better highway rescue, bringing the issue to the Union of B.C. Municipalities in September.

“Right now, we’re using our volunteer fire departments in Barriere, Blackpool and Clearwater, using volunteer firefighters as our rescue [team]. It puts a lot of pressure on them,” he said. “We’re relying on small communities to be able to put these resources together and we just don’t have the taxpayer base to be able to do. We need from the government to be able to help us in those situations.”

Kamloops-North Thompson MLA Peter Milobar says it’s up to the current provincial government to make the necessary highway improvements.

“Unfortunately over the last few years, what we’ve seen since 2017 and the change in government is what we had previously is every year there was a passing lane or a corner being straightened on the stretch between here and Jasper. Now, for the last five years there’s been nothing, and unfortunately we don’t see anything in the budget for this year or future years,” said Milobar.

Milobar says motorists take too many chances on the Yellowhead, and with more passing lanes that may improve driver behaviour.

“Every time I go up the valley, all the way up to Blue River in my riding, you see dangerous passing, you see people getting impatient because of a lack of passing opportunities,” he said. “So that’s really at its core here is each time you add a passing opportunity that’s safe, it gets people to be a little more relaxed behind the wheel.”

Stamer would also like to see an RCMP traffic reconstructionist located in Kamloops who is closeby when a serious collision occurs on Highway 5.

“When we had that fatal on Wednesday night just south of Little Fort, there was nobody available from Kelowna. They had to bring a specialist from Chilliwack and the highway was closed for 12 hours because of that,” noted Stamer. “We’ve had time and time again where it’s taken a long time to get those specialists to come up and do the accident re-creation.”

by Chad Klassen

Barriere mayor wants Yellowhead Highway safety concerns addressed by governments

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