Red Rock Inspection Station Opens

By 250 News

Art Kaehn, MP Dick Harris, MLAs Shirley Bond and Pat Bell, BCTA Pres Paul Landry

Red Rock, B.C.- The new Red Rock Inspection Station and Weigh-in-Motion weigh scale on Highway 97 south of Prince George is officially open for business...

The facility came in one year behind schedule and tipped the budgetary scale at $9-million over the original $30-million dollar price tag, due to soil issues.

But today was a day for officials to celebrate the finished product and the technology and safety improvements that will benefit all motorists along the route. Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Shirley Bond says"Today is a great day for us, it is an opportunity for us to open what is the third Weigh-in-Motion technology facility in British Columbia. It is a state-of-the-art facility, it has the ability to actually help the trucking association and truckers across the province, so, you know, it's an important project as we look at the efficient flow of goods and people."

The Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) technology can remotely weigh and measure commercial vehicles for compliance, while the carriers travel over motion sensors built into the road at highway speeds. There are already approximately 600 trucks in B.C. carrying the necessary transponder (shown in photo at right), more than 300 of those are in northern B.C. And BC Trucking Association President, Paul Landry, says "Carriers who participate in the Weigh2GoBC program are seeing demonstrable savings of time and fuel, which is good for the economy, a benefit to the environment, and important to their bottom lines."

Cariboo-Prince George MP Dick Harris was on-hand on behalf of the federal government, a financial partner in the project under the Economic Action Plan. Harris says although the contractor on the project was not local, "of the trades people, the skilled workers and the labourers and the flagpeople -- everyone involved in this project -- 80-percent of them are from the Prince George and District area."

And Fraser-Fort George Regional District Chair, Art Kaehn, who lives in the area says the benefits of the project have also been felt by residents living in the small communities in the area.

"I saw it down in Hixon, I'm seeing it here (Red Rock), I'm seeing it at Stone Creek and elsewhere, where there's extra pavement in the communities, the roads in the communities are improved, there's better street lighting and better approaches to get on and off the highway -- and those are all important things for our communities out here," says Kaehn. "They make them more liveable, they make them safer and they make them a better place to raise our families, so those are things that people don't think about when you drive by here."

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