With Halloween only three weeks away, it seems that the City of Thompson’s planning department encountered their own ghost this fall, when construction crews working on Selkirk Road encountered an unwelcome surprise while excavating the area in front of the RCMP building.
Director of planning Matthew Boscariol drove by the morning that the crew made the discovery, noting they had opened a hole that may as well have been the beginning of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. “I got back to my office, and there’s five messages on my answering machine from my engineering manager: ‘We found another road!’”
Six feet below the waking world, crews had discovered an entire old road, running perpendicular to Selkirk Drive and under existing infrastructure. The mystery deepened when Boscariol could find no record of the road within 20 years of city planning documents. Nonetheless, he wasn’t entirely surprised, noting that much of Thompson was built rapidly during boom cycles, with little thought towards long-term planning.
Prior to any capital project, the city orders a pre-construction consultation to assess a property prior to construction: in the case of Selkirk, this meant core samples taken every fifty metres along the roadway, standard intervals for roadway testing. Nonetheless, the placement of the road meant it avoided detection. “They provided us with excellent samples, showing what we expected. However, in between the first and second drill point, we missed something.”
The discovery had a significant impact on the project, incurring higher equipment, labour and dumping costs, impacting the final extent of the project. “We had aimed to get past the intersection with the one-way,” said Boscariol, “but we had to scale back as a result of the extra costs.” Project completion was delayed by a week-and-a-half, in part also due to problems with the crew’s excavator.
The City of Thompson could not comment on cost, having not received a final invoice as of yet.
