A volunteer committee that has been quietly exploring the development of a road from Powell River to 樱桃视频is ready to unveil a preliminary concept to the public.
The committee has organized an open house on Thursday (June 16). Co-ordinator Paul Schachter said the group is trying to determine if there was a feasible route, if it was financially possible, and if it was beneficial to Powell River.
"We did discover that, at least on mapping, there is a feasible route," he said.
The group used TRIM (Terrain Resource Information Manage-ment) mapping, a resource that consists of 7,027 mapsheets covering the province of BC at a scale of 1:20,000.
The entire road is approximately 215 km. Of that, 62.5 km will be new road and the remainder is an upgrade of existing roads.
The maximum elevation the group is shooting for is 1,000 metres. "It does go up pretty high," said Schachter. "It does go across the Coastal Mountains." But there would be a grade of no more than 10 degrees on any part of the road, he added.
Schachter said the committee has envisioned a phased project which is in stage one, the pre-feasibility. If the route is possible and if there is support for it, then the next step will be to figure out if the route is feasible on the ground.
The committee plans on holding open houses and talking to people in all the communities affected including Squamish, Courtenay, Comox and Campbell River, as the group is calling the road the Vancouver Island-Interior connector. Then they'll talk to other stakeholder groups, industries, businesses, First Nations, and provincial agencies.
