Vancouver — Swerving his truck between orange pylons to pull onto a narrow shoulder, engineer Rod Vanwerkhoven glances up a dizzying wall of black rock that looms above the Sea to Sky Highway.
"In a lot of places the cliffs are so steep you can't even work on the rock face. It's like a 300-foot vertical right there," he says, before pulling back onto the hazardous road that once threatened to cost British Columbia its chance to host the 2010 Olympic Games.
It didn't, but only because the province undertook a massive, 100-kilometre, $775-million engineering feat.
A 600- to 800-strong team is moving 2.4 million cubic meters of fill, in one stretch alone blasting away enough rock to fill 500 railway boxcars. They are laying pavement over what was once thin air and, in the process, turning an unsafe mountain road — which has about 400 accidents annually, and has had 40 deaths in five years — into a modern highway where traffic will speed up and the accident rate will drop.
Long regarded as one of the most dangerous and beautiful drives in B.C., Highway 99 was considered such a scenic selling point that Vancouver and Whistler initially pitched its Olympic bid as "the Sea to Sky Games," highlighting the dramatic natural setting.
But when International Olympic Committee members got a look at the narrow, winding road, which clings to the precipitous terrain of the Coast Mountains like a frightened snake, they questioned whether Games venues should really be separated by such a slow, twisting route.
In 2002, Vancouver Organizing Committee chairman Jack Poole identified the need for a better highway as a possible deal-breaker in the bid and urged the government "to tell us what the solution will be."
In 2003, shortly before the Games were awarded, IOC evaluation team chairman Gerhard Heiberg set off alarms when he returned from a drive to Whistler to declare it was "too far from Vancouver" to host venues. "You need to shorten the [driving] time," he said.
Fearing the bid might fail, the B.C. government responded by promising an enormous improvement project that had been talked about for years. Since it began in 2004, the project has left engineers like Mr. Vanwerkhoven with some daunting challenges.
"We can't even imagine how to do blasting there," he said of the cliff that vanishes into clouds above the highway on a stretch between Lions Bay and Porteau Cove. On the other side of the road the slope plunges down into Howe Sound, where a CN Rail line squeezes along the waterfront, limiting the space in which crews have to work.
If you are an engineer whose job it is to make this busy highway wider, safer and faster in time for the Games, this is what it means to be caught between a rock and a hard place: On one side is a solid mountain wall; on the other, a sudden drop to the sea.
But Mr. Vanwerkhoven, who is with the design-build contractor Peter Kiewit Sons Co., doesn't hesitate when asked where the road goes from here.
"We build out there," he said, gesturing to the ocean side where a work crew is constructing what is technically known as a mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) retaining wall.
In some places, crews have been able to cut away rock on the upslope of the highway. But that isn't an option when the cliffs above are so high that millions of tonnes of rock would have to be removed. Here, the only solution is to go out over the bank, where a crew is building an MSE wall with layers of crushed rock, grids of heavy wire and hundreds of anchors buried deep in bedrock.
About 60 MSE walls are being built on the 16-kilometre section Mr. Vanwerkhoven is working on, which will allow traffic to eventually travel on pavement where there was once nothing but air.
And the entire project must be undertaken without closing the existing highway because there is no alternative route to Whistler, other than a five-hour detour through Lillooet.
