Repair work announced last year by the Department of Natural Resources has upgraded long stretches of the South Branch Road and the Goose River Resource Access Road, creating a convenient detour past what was once the indisputable Hub of Labrador. Those two gravel tracks have been impassable for decades to anyone not driving a snowmobile in the winter or some kind of four-by-four at other times of the year.
Flat sections that weren’t cut by deep culvert wash-outs were usable for short distances, but rain and snowmelt had turned most of the hills into treacherous streambeds. In those days drivers might have saved on mileage, but after carefully navigating up and down and across numerous gullies and around large, loose boulders hours were added to their trips.
Now almost the whole distance of the two interconnected roads, from where the South Branch leaves the Trans Labrador Highway close to Muskrat Falls to where the Goose River Resource Road meets the dump road by the Goose River, can be taken at a comfortable 50 kilometers per hour in any kind of vehicle.
This is good news for many, but community leaders of Happy Valley-Goose Bay might not appreciate the opportunity given to their neighbours and to visitors to avoid the streets and businesses of their town. However, they might accept the diminished traffic once they realize it’s another of the sacrifices demanded for the long-promised Lower Churchill Hydroelectric Project.
It is quite unlikely that the Newfoundland government fixed up the almost 20-kilometer loop of dirt for the enjoyment of Labradorians or the benefit of local resource-extractors. The money that went into it was taxpayer’s money (the same that’s not available to repair and upgrade the Trans Labrador and the Labrador Coastal Highways), but it was spent for a semi-private purpose.
The road upgrade was needed because the best place for Nalcor (the province’s energy corporation) to land massive earth-moving machines and many tons of supplies and materials is at an also-to-be-rebuilt deepwater port on Northwest Point. Once the gear is on land Nalcor has to move it to the construction sites at Muskrat Falls and the Gull Island Rapids. Then there’s no choice but to freight it down the main street of the Innu reserve at Sheshatshiu, but with the work on the access roads finished it can now be easily rerouted around Happy Valley-Goose Bay.
Nalcor is also allowed to pretend that it doesn’t need to wait for the completion of an environmental review process (a test it seems more and more likely to fail) before going ahead with the construction of three new mega-dams on the Churchill River -
Funds are always tight when civic improvements are needed for the citizens of Labrador, but if any government agency or department is doing anything connected to the Lower Churchill it is free to draw from a seemingly bottomless well of public money. Nalcor is also allowed to pretend that it doesn’t need to wait for the completion of an environmental review process (a test it seems more and more likely to fail) before going ahead with the construction of three new mega-dams on the Churchill River. Right now Nalcor is running at least two helicopters, two drill-rigs, and a crew of more than 50 men to cut trees, survey benchmarks and sink test holes into the bedrock underneath the lower falls at Muskrat.
If the cost of this work is added to what government has already doled out to prepare for the Lower Churchill boondoggle the total would probably top $500-million. If only a portion of this money had been used to develop cheaper, cleaner and more efficient energy sources like solar or tidal, the many dirty diesel generators still used on the Labrador coast could have been replaced by now. Then Nalcor’s boast of being green wouldn’t just be a smokescreen to hide the filthy truth about hydro dams.
In fact, the cost of the helicopters alone could probably have paid for a whole state-of-the-art wind farm for some lucky Labrador community.
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