DRIVING IN and around the city will be smooth going after scheduled roadwork is completed in the next month.
Road repair along Hwy 16 by the two new bridges between the four-way stop and Wal-Mart is expected to begin this week.
Workers will mill down just a couple of inches and fill it back in with fresh pavement, said Don Ramsay of the Ministry of Transportation.
Ramsay says the work will be done at night, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., to minimize traffic disruption.
At that same time, workers will begin pulverizing the pavement on the Nisga'a Hwy north of Halliwell, he added.
Pulverizing means going in with a grinder that goes one foot to 14 inches down and chews up the existing asphalt and the sub-base gravels underneath the asphalt, explained
Ramsay.
The asphalt is chewed up and put back down as a base for the new paving, he said.
Once the paving is finished on Hwy 16 by Wal-Mart, the paving machine will go to the Nisga'a Hwy and pave the 12 km from Halliwell Ave. to Glacier Creek, which will take a little longer as it will skip a section from Deep Creek to about 4 km north of Deep Creek, said Ramsay.
The Nisga'a Hwy pavement in that area is very old and prone to potholes so this work will ensure crews won't need to be up there again for a while, he said.
The work will probably go into the first and second weeks of July, he added.
Highway 16 west will undergo skip patching to fill in the gaps from the last time it was done two years ago; at that time the worst sections were done to make the money go as far as possible, said Ramsay. Skip patching is putting down long surface patches, he said.
And about a dozen streets in upper and lower Thornhill will be paved, which will be about 11 km, he added.
Besides the roadwork by the new bridges, the other projects will take place during the week with short delays of only 20 minutes maximum and single lane alternating traffic, said Ramsay. All the roadwork should be finished by the end of July for a cost of about $8 million, he said.