The intersection at Sixth Street and 13th Avenue has been a bit of a bottleneck lately. With construction going on and the lights having been turned off, motorists have been using the intersection like a four-way stop, with stop signs set up on the road, while SaskPower and Estevan Public Works take measures to get the lights running again.
Estevan city manager Amber Smale said the traffic lights went out due to a power pole being struck by a motorist on Sept. 20.
“We estimated SaskPower fixing it within a week. They weren’t able to, because (the signs are) still set up there,” said Smale in a phone call with the Mercury last week.
Jonathan Tremblay, a spokesperson for SaskPower said that the lights were expected to be up and running again by Monday. As of the press deadline of the Mercury, however, the lights were still down, and the stop signs were still in place.
Smale noted the incident that knocked out the power for the lights has happened before, with motorists having hit power poles at the intersection twice last year.
“It took us a while to do all the repairs to the damage,” said Tremblay. “SaskPower completed most of the work over the weekend.”
Tremblay said repairs took as long as they did because of the nature of the damage to the wiring of the power pole.
“Sometimes when vehicles crash into poles, they tear up the lines as well. That’s what happened there – they tore up some wiring in the lights,” said Tremblay. “We wanted to make sure everything is safe, and that there were no shorts anywhere. We had to do some rewiring.”
Smale noted that if there wasn’t asphalt resurfacing work happening on Sixth Street from 13 Avenue to Souris Avenue South, and Souris Avenue South from Sixth Street to Fourth Street, traffic would probably be considerably heavier at the intersection, because there’d be more larger vehicles crossing in that particular area.
“It’s not really slowing down traffic too much, because we have trucks diverted from the area, due to construction,” Smale said. “With that, the highway is blocked off, going eastbound onto Sixth Street, so the lights would only be beneficial for north-south traffic, and the few cars coming eastbound and turning north onto Souris.”
