Highway #5 between Humboldt and Saskatoon is one of the most dangerous highways in Saskatchewan, especially from the corner of Highway #2 to Saskatoon.
Over the five year period between 2011 and 2015 – the latest data available from SGI – the section between Saskatoon and Patience Lake is ranked seventh out of 112 in the province for its collision rate.
It’s third for collisions causing injures. In first is Highway #305 from Warman to Highway #12 and second is Highway #7 from Saskatoon to Highway #60.
The section from Patience Lake to Highway #2 is ranked eighth for its collision rate. The rest of the way to Humboldt is ranked 33rd.
All 112 sections had traffic counts of more than 2,000 vehicles per day in 2015.
The problem with Highway #5: it goes through hilly country, the road has many curves, some portions are narrower than provincial standards – which is 3.7 metres wide for driving lanes and two metres for shoulders, and pools of water encroach the side of the highway at certain locations. That means passing slower vehicles is more dangerous than most highways.
“As far as motor vehicle collisions go, it’s one of our busier highways due to the number of vehicles on it and it being so busy,” said Derek Dagenais, an advanced care paramedic and supervisor with Humboldt & District Ambulance. He added the road can be tricky to navigate for those who aren’t familiar with it.
An average of 2,400 vehicles travel the highway per day, a number similar to the more rural parts of Highway #16, the Trans-Canada highway.
In total, there have been 390 collisions on Highway #5 between 2011 and 2015. If you placed those 390 collisions equally across the 93.8-kilometre highway, there’s a collision every 240 metres – the distance from the library to the Journal office. There have been 59 collisions causing injury. Spaced equally, that’s 1.5 kilometres – the distance from the courthouse to the post office. Finally, there have been six fatal collisions, which spaced equally, would be every 16.6 kilometres.
None of those stats include the six deaths – according to police and media reports – on the highway in 2016 and 2017. The five years before that saw nine deaths.
Attending the scene
Brian Florizone, Vonda’s fire chief, and his fire department are often called to attend major collisions on the portion of Highway #5 between Saskatoon and Highway #2 because they are the closest. The highway is 20 kilometres from Vonda.
“We’ve been to a lot of them. It’s a high traffic, high collision area, especially between that St. Denis grid and the 39-mile corner, the junction of #5 and #2,” he said. “It’s really bad. We hardly get called out to any other highway. I would say that 90 per cent of our calls are traffic accidents, (motor vehicle accidents), are on Highway #5.”
Florizone’s counterpart in Humboldt, Mike Kwasnica, deals with the portion between Humboldt and Highway #2.
“The majority of our motor vehicle accidents are Highway #5 west of Humboldt,” he said, acknowledging that the worst parts of the highway take place outside his jurisdiction.
It’s the narrowness of the highway that causes a lot of problems for emergency services.
“If we’re doing a lights and sirens response to Saskatoon, for example, with a critical patient, it doesn’t give people places or room to pull over, especially once we’re past the second junction with Highway #2,” Dagenais said. “It’s obviously much more narrow there, so nobody has room to pull to the right and allow us room to pass.”
Florizone said there’s problems when trying to attend the scene.
“It’s a challenge because we have no shoulder to work on. A lot of times when we arrive on scene, we shut traffic down for as short a period of time as possible.”
Dagenais said because of the remoteness of the area, police, fire and ambulance services often don’t arrive at the same time.
“It’s not uncommon, for example, because we do so many city trips, that we come across accidents on a regular basis that have happened and we haven’t been called for, so a lot of times we’re trying to set up a scene and protect a scene with one ambulance at that time,” Dagenais said. “ It’s also not uncommon for that to happen when we’re on another call and have a patient onboard, so that gets quite tricky for us in those narrow places or places where visibility’s poor, such as a crest of a hill or around a curve.”
The Vonda fire chief said larger shoulders would be on his wish list for improvements on the road.
The Humboldt RCMP, which deals with the highway until it reaches Highway #2, said it notices no difference between it and other highways it serves. The Saskatoon RCMP, which deals with the rest, declined to comment.
Getting improvements
Rob Muench, Humboldt’s mayor, said he’s concerned about the state of Highway #5.
“It’s a major connector. It’s between two cities and I don’t know of any other road between two cities in the province that are similar to that.”
He said the highway is important for manufacturers like CIM in Humboldt, Doepker in Anaheim, Schulte in Englefeld and Michels in St. Gregor, as well as for local farmers to get their product to market.
Yet the mayor is more concerned about the highway’s safety.
“(Humboldt residents) travel that highway and their friends travel that highway. A lot of people that I know have had somebody involved in an accident on that road at some point,” he said. “It’s something that’s a concern, not only for Humboldt but surrounding communities that use that highway as well.”
That’s why Muench asked David Marit, the highways and infrastructure minister, about the highway at the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association’s convention in February. He said he was told Highway #5 was in the top five in the priority list.
Donna Harpauer, the MLA for Humboldt-Watrous, did not comment on the issue. Representatives said she was too busy as a cabinet minister working on the upcoming provincial budget and referred the Journal to the ministry of transportation. They added she has been lobbying Marit for improvements
Paul Spasoff, a spokesperson with the ministry of transportation, said there has been preconstruction work done on the highway. That involves tasks like determining the challenges and the best way to overcome them, determining the number of sets of passing lanes and their locations, and identifying what land needs to be bought for the improvements.
“It’s still underway. We had been working on that last season and there’s still work that is taking place on that.”
Some of that preconstruction work has been done and the land bought at certain locations.
Spasoff said no specific plans would be revealed until the provincial budget March 22.
Doug Wakabayashi, also a transportation ministry spokesperson, said when deciding to place passing lanes, the ministry looks at factors like traffic volumes and to which extent they increase, the type of vehicles on a given stretch of highway, the times which traffic moves, features on the road like hills and sharp curves that tend to limit passing opportunities, and the history of collisions on the highway.
He added that the human factor is also important to consider.
“The thing that has the most significant impact on highway safety is driver behaviour. In North America, human factors are the major contributing factors to in the order of 90 per cent of collisions.”
Those factors include driving too fast for road conditions, alcohol and lack of driver attentiveness.
Muench said while he hopes there will be good news in the budget, his city will continue to lobby for improvements.
“I think that will need to be addressed at some point here and we’ll continue to, as a city, look for solutions through the department of infrastructure and highways, to make sure we’re not forgotten here.”
