After several delays, Municipality of Pontiac Mayor Joanne Labadie is hopeful that construction to repair a washout on chemin Alary is within a few weeks from being completed.

The road was washed out during the floods that occurred on Oct. 30, 2017.

The $612,393 price tag initially raised eyebrows, but after the municipality’s engineer looked over the costs, he said they were correct.

The municipality is getting a majority of the costs of the repairs from provincial coffers, but there were conditions attached to the funds. For instance, the municipality had to get a much larger culvert to withstand potential flooding in the future.

“We could have gone in and replaced the culvert with what was there before but we wouldn’t have received any compensation and, not only that, but we would not have been compensated had this same thing occurred again,” Labadie said.

As a result, the municipality had to have a culvert specially made.

When the municipality approached the supplier for the culvert, there was backlog, which created a risk of installing a brand-new culvert in colder-than-usual conditions after an early cold snap.

“It got very cold, very quickly,” she said. “There was going to be approximately a $100,000 surcharge to be able to meet the winter conditions.”

Additionally, a massive amount of construction around the province meant that the supplier who was making the made-to-measure culvert was backlogged.

“By the time the culvert would have been ready and delivered, it pushed the date later and later into the fall,” Labadie said. “The engineer also cautioned us that the culvert was freshly made and the concrete would not have had time to cure as well as they would have liked.”

She said that the engineer recommended that the work be delayed until the spring thaw.

While many residents have been critical of the municipality for the delays to chemin Alary’s construction, Labadie said that other municipalities are also awaiting work to be done after washouts that resulted from the fall floods in 2017.

It’s a problem that’s shared by municipalities across the province according to a report by the Quebec Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Public Security.

“In that report, they identified that 60 per cent of the culverts in the province of Quebec were undersized to be able to meet the changes and adaptations needed for climate change,” Labadie said. “So we’re trying to be proactive so that we don’t have recurrences of this.”

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