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The mayor of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB) wants to send the bill to the province after the municipality rescued hundreds of people stranded on Highway 63 during a northern Alberta snowstorm last month.
Between 300 and 400 vehicles were blocked for hours as a major snowstorm hit the highway about 140 kilometres south of Fort McMurray on April 23. Some people were stranded overnight. No one was injured, although police said emergency workers struggled to reach a passenger who was having a medical emergency.
Mayor Sandy Bowman said in an interview with CBC News that the RMWB had communication issues with the province during the crisis. The municipality sent snowplows, tow trucks and buses to the area.
Bowman said keeping highways clear is the responsibility of the Alberta government and its contractors.
“I would like to hand the province a bill and they can deal with it, because there was a huge financial cost,” he said. “We had plow trucks running for almost 24 hours, making a loop to clear the highway ourselves.
“You would never see that happen on the QE2, for 300 vehicles to be stuck there for 16 hours. Those things do not happen to other places in Alberta.”
Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen said Tuesday he is meeting with Bowman this week and that who will cover the bill will be discussed.
Dreeshen said the contractor had between five and 10 snowplows ready to respond to a snowstorm that he described as intense. But the biggest obstacles to reaching people, he said, were accidents on the highway that needed to be cleared.
“It wasn’t so much the snow and the plows not being able to go out there, it was semis actually blocking the roads and obviously the need to get tow trucks there to clear the accident scene,” Dreeshen said during a media scrum at the legislature.
Last week, Dreeshen said the incident demonstrates the importance of the Highway 686 extension, which will connect the Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie regions. Highway 63 is, for now, the only direct route out of Fort McMurray.
“I think communication is going to be a good lesson learned of how best 511, the RCMP and municipalities and the province can better communicate with drivers when it comes to these big snow events,” said Dreeshen.
The province recently completed a review of how its Highway 63 maintenance contractor responded to the storm, but it has not yet been published. The RMWB’s council voted unanimously on Tuesday to undertake its own investigation into how the municipality responded to the incident.
