The back roads in this area are starting to get a bit treacherous. I’ve noticed this as I’ve travelled them in the evenings, looking for interesting things to photograph, a lot of previously easy to handle routes and typically well maintained roads have developed soft spots, frost boils and other things that I don’t particularly want to deal with in a sensible hatchback with no ground clearance.
This is not the fault of the Rural Municipalities. It’s their problem, of course, the roads are under their jurisdiction and they will be the ones inevitably called upon to do the repairs, but they didn’t cause the damage to occur, either through neglect or poor repairs. Even doing a good job, they’re still coming up against a huge number of bad spots on the rural roads. They might have difficulty getting ahead of the game this year, however, as the roads are so universally bad, and problem spots are so ubiquitous, that it would take more resources than they could possibly have to get ahead of the game. It’s not like it’s a perfect situation within the city, either, because there have been road problems in urban areas as well. It seems like no matter where you go in this part of the province, you have to be always on alert for a rough patch or a missing bit of roadway, lest you damage something.
It’s not the fault of any level of government, actually. It’s the kind of thing that you have to address once the spring thaw happens and you get a clear picture of how the roads handled the winter. There could be examinations of different road building techniques, specifically methods built to handle the excessive amount of water that has defined this area for the past several years. It’s an aftershock of the new wet reality, one coming after years of flooding and saturated ground, now we have to deal with roads that are slowly disintegrating after too much water has chipped away at their foundations.
To be honest, even if the roads here are beginning to get difficult to traverse it could be worse. The flooding of the Quill Lakes region is unprecedented and since the water has nowhere to really go it’s putting homes and livelihoods at risk. There, the water has nowhere to really go and has been building up steadily over the past few years, areas that were clearly dry decades ago have been lakes for so long younger people might not realize how strange it was. While it might be tempting to blame government there, it’s also a case where nobody really knows what to do with all that water, it’s not like we can run a big hose to the drought stricken areas of California.
This might appear to be just complaining, observing once again that this entire region has suddenly found itself with more water than we know what to do with. After all, this is going to cost millions of dollars, whether in road repairs or lost income for the people who can’t access farm land because it’s basically a lake. But then again, we have an opportunity as well. We can learn how to build new roads, some that can handle the new environmental reality, and we can use that knowledge for the next area that is saturated with water. We can learn how to deal with drainage for the next lake that spills over its traditional banks. And once we learn all that, the patterns will probably just shift all over again.
