And Saturday's over eight inches of rainfall had a consequential effect on the highway infrastructure heading into Belmopan.
The George Price Highway at Mile 45 was closed for five and a half hours - from late morning to mid afternoon - after Mount Pleasant Creek overflowed, sending high, fast-moving currents across the pavement. The closure effectively stranded commuters traveling westbound to Belmopan or eastbound to the City.
Today, speaking via Zoom, the MIDH Chief Engineer told us that it was a hard decision but a necessary one:
Evondale Moody, Chief Engineer
"It was really difficult decision for us to make. I know when I discussed it with the minister, he was not happy with the decision because it's a major highway, as you're mentioning. However, in an effort to land an abundance of safety, we had to ensure that the motorists using the highways are safe. And from what I saw on the site, that water was moving at a high velocity across the highway, that we could not take the chance to allow vehicles to pass through."
"Two major sections were affected on our highways. One was the Mount Pleasant area, located between mile 45 and to 46 on the George Prince Highway. And also, we had water crossing the highway between mile 43 and 44 near Benny's."
"The most significant one was the Mount Pleasant area where we had over two feet of water crossing the highway. That water basically originated from the west of Belmopan, coming from J&W.."
"As you may know, we're doing construction works along the George Price Highway at this point in time. And exactly where the water overtopped the highway is where we're supposed to build a new bridge. So we had the diversion in place at that location. It was expected that we were going to cut that road this week because we were going to shift traffic over to the diversion."
"But now we have to reach re-strag because that has been damaged."
"We still have to proceed with the construction of that new bridge. That new bridge structure is really, really important to the George PRICE Highway project, because this is the second time that that flood event has occurred at Mount Pleasant. The last time it was in June 2020. And so it has repeated itself six years later at an even higher intensity. And so we expect that we will try and start this bridge very soon, maybe within another couple of weeks. It will take us at least one year to finish that bridge STRCUTURE. And so we have to have the diversion in place to allow traffic to continuously flow along the George PRICE Highway. But we also want to look at that back road in the event we have a repeated, occurrence of this rainfall, that we will also have an alternate road for vehicular traffic to pass through BELMOPAN."
