Battleford council has awarded a contract to consulting engineers Catterall and Wright of Saskatoon to do road condition indexing of streets in the town.
This will look at all the roads in the town of Battleford. The consultants will partner with Fugro Roadware Inc. who will assist in collecting the data. Fugro will be using a surveying vehicle called ARAN (Automated Roadway Analyzer) to scan all the streets in the town.
They will be using “ground-penetrating radar” that will look at such things as asphalt thickness and granular thickness on each street. Then the data will be reviewed and reported, with the results going into a five-and-ten-year Capital Plan to help with prioritizing which streets are most in need of upgrades or rehabilitation.
The idea, according to CAO John Enns-Wind, was for council to be able to make informed decisions on which streets should be the priority and to take the guesswork out of such decisions.
Mayor Derek Mahon told reporters that the underground piping needs will also be looked at and that will be factored into the priority ratings as well.
The last time such a survey was done was in 2012, but that was a street-by-street analysis that did not include the ground-penetrating radar and data collection.
“This is taking it to a whole different level than what we’ve done previously,” Mahon said at council.
The total cost for the proposal is $78,000, and that was carried at council Monday. The road indexing work begins immediately.
