Parents are calling on the city to wrap up construction along Ewen Avenue in Queensborough, saying the dust is causing health problems for their kids.
Terryl Plotnikoff's four-year-old son attends Merseyside Montessori preschool near Boyd Street and Ewen Avenue, and last week Plotnikoff was told by her family doctor that her son would need a puffer to keep his lungs clear.
"The dust is just so bad that he was coughing all (the time)," Plotnikoff told The Record. "(Tuesday) night was the final straw for me because my little guy was up for a good portion of the night because his throat hurt, his eyes hurt and he was coughing."
On Wednesday (June 5), Plotnikoff called the City of New Westminster to explain the trouble her son, and the other kids at the preschool, were having with the excessive dust coming off Ewen Avenue.
"We've been going back and forth with the city all day trying to find out when things are going to move along," she said.
After she and her husband both spoke with city officials a spray truck was sent to Ewen Avenue to try and contain the dust.
Ewen Avenue was torn up about five months ago and since then it has deteriorated because of the wet weather the city had in spring, Plotnikoff said.
"It's just full of potholes," she said. "So it's either all mud or it's just all dust, it's incredible."
And to make matters worse, an industrial container storage yard opened across the street from the preschool about three months ago, she said.
"There are dozens and dozens and dozens of tractor trailers and shipping containers being trucked in there, along this dry, dusty dirt road ... so there's just huge amounts of dust," she said.
According to the city, the construction along Ewen Avenue is about two months behind schedule. Contractors are replacing the utility lines in the road and because of the bad shape of the pavement the city decided to repave it as well. This meant taking the road right back to the gravel and dirt below, said Roger Emanuels, manager of design and construction for New Westminster.
Emanuels agreed the road has been a nuisance for residents in that area, especially now that the warmer weather has set in.
"It's probably hit a peak in the last week because we're getting dryer weather now and it's generating more dust," he said.
What's more, the contractors couldn't do the work piece by piece, instead they had to do the entire stretch of Ewen Avenue between Derwent Way/Boyd Street and Furness Street in order to properly install the new lines, Emanuels said.
"They've had some real challenges because they've had to work over top of a Metro Vancouver water main, which is quite old and in unstable ground," he said.
Because of the state of the Metro Vancouver line, Emanuels said contractors working on Ewen Avenue have had to use smaller equipment so as not to damage or break the water line.
A break of this kind happened on Thursday (today) morning. Crews working on the road hit a distribution line coming off the main Metro Vancouver water line at about 9 a.m. According to a city press release, a contractor was installing a pipe at Furness Street and Ewen Avenue when he hit and damaged a water main.
Emanuels said water was shut off to the Port Royal area for a couple of hours while crews diverted the water to another line in the loop.
With water back on in the area by 11:30 a.m. construction crews were able to get back to work on the road.
Emanuels said that the curbs would be installed June 18 and the final paving will be done shortly after that. Until then, he said the city would do its best to keep the dust to a minimum.
"We had about 500 containers being moved from one location into this new location along this gravel road," he said. "It was kind of unforeseen that we would have 500 truck movements."
The city has asked the container company to minimize the amount of trucks travelling in and out of the yard until the final paving is complete, Emanuels said.
In the meantime, the container company will use their other facility on Boyd Street across from Queensborough Landing, while city crews will continue to spray the gravel road with calcium chloride, which is said to help hold in moisture, Emanuels added.
