A St. Albert company has been tapped to build a new bridge to Fort Saskatchewan.
Alberta Transportation Minister Ric McIver announced last week that the province had awarded the contracts to twin Hwy. 15 near Fort Saskatchewan. In development since 2017, this $120 million project will involve building a second bridge over the North Saskatchewan River.
The bridge, currently the only river crossing into Fort Saskatchewan, sees some 23,000 vehicle crossings a day and is a frequent site for traffic jams on both sides of the river. Traffic loads on it have grown 50 per cent since 2009, the province reports.
In a press conference, McIver said this project had been a long time coming, and that his phone had been “ringing off the hook” with complaints about congestion on this road. This project would expand the highway so that it had two lanes of traffic in both directions instead of just one.
“As a result of this twinning, people will get home quicker, goods and services will move more efficiently, and traffic congestion will be decreased, and those phone calls might slow down,” he said.
McIver said that the first part of the twinning project – the three kilometres of Hwy. 15 leading up to the Hwy. 37 intersection – was underway, with Wells Construction set to finish its work this fall. St. Albert’s Alberco Construction would build the new bridge and the roads leading up to it, with its work set to finish around 2022.
Alberco owner Ron Simonsmeier said this $54-million project was important for his company, given the poor economic climate, and that he’d have to hire about 15 more people to manage it.
“We’re very, very pleased we did get this job.”
Simonsmeier said this would be a challenging project that would see crews construct a new bridge parallel to the current one and build a suspended walkway under it. Crews were now setting up trailers on site and expected to have the bridge’s support pillars in the river in six months.
Sturgeon County Mayor Alanna Hnatiw said this project was vital to ensure Alberta’s Industrial Heartland had the infrastructure it needed to continue to grow. Still, she questioned when the province would get moving on replacing the Vinca Bridge across the North Saskatchewan near Redwater, which was a vital heavy-haul route for the Heartland.
The $90 million Vinca Bridge project was announced last year and is set to start in 2020, the province’s major projects map website suggests. In an email, Mark Jacka, chief of staff for the minister of transportation, said that the project was one of the many capital items being reviewed as part of this fall’s budget.
