Spectra Energy is notifying affected businesses that it has encountered some delays in the pipeline maintenance it currently has underway in 100 Mile House.
The work began on Sept. 27 with a hydrovac process and excavation of two pits on Alder Avenue (near Smitty's), and then prepared the South Cariboo Visitor Centre (SCVC) parking lot surface for digging up later this fall.
Spectra Energy Western Canada media representative Jesse Semko notes that while the project was originally scheduled to be completed by December, final work on the west side (by SCVC) is now anticipated to be finished in January, and then both areas will be paved in the spring.
Meanwhile, crews will put down a type of temporary paving layer, he explains.
The SCVC is not expected to reopen until January.
However, Semko says the west side is still expected to be completed in November, so businesses on Alder Avenue should not be further impacted by Spectra work this winter.
The reason for this slight delay is crews came upon a fibre-optic cable that was "not supposed to be there" because they'd been informed by another utility company that these lines were somewhere else, he explains.
Semko says when Spectra initially starts to develop a project scope at a site, it does what is called a "line locate" where it asks all the other utility companies to send in the detailed co-ordinates of any buried infrastructure they have in the area.
"Once we have that, then we create an excavation plan that becomes a part of the project schedule.
"When we were hydrovacing, we encountered some buried infrastructure that had not been [line] located. So we had to support it with a beam, and work around it."
It takes "a little longer" to work around something like that when you are excavating in such a confined space, and this resulted in a change to the project schedule, he adds.
"Because we are still working on the east side [of Highway 97], we haven't got to the west side."
More information is available by contacting Murdo McLeod at 250-373-7014 or mmcleod@spectraenergy.com.