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TransCanada Road Repair Update
News Articles | | October 15, 2009
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Ron Whites drives a school bus, four times a day, on county road 203rd street. But he’s been running into a problem the past few months, gravel roads covered in mud. He says the damage is a result of the installation of the TransCanada keystone pipeline that started in July.
Ron Whites says, “When they did the construction, they went out of their work zone and it rained and it was muddy and every truck that came out of there and went either east or west on the road deposited quite a bit of mud from our field on the road.”
Since the construction wrapped up late this summer, Whites says he’s been waiting….and waiting for the roads to be repaired.
Ron Whites received a letter from the TransCanada Keystone Pipeline in July that says they would continue to repair the roads to their original condition after they were done with construction, but it wasn’t until this week that any progress was made.”
On Wednesday the worst portion of the road was leveled, but the rest of the road still needs to be regraveled. So why the hold up? TransCanada says they take full responsibility for the damage, but that they’re negotiating a settlement with the county. Before the project began, the county took video of what the roads looked like. When the project wrapped up, Beadle County assessed the road damage and sent a settlement request to TransCanada. But when that request was higher than TransCanada thought it should be, they sent an engineer to evaluate the damage instead of money to fix the roads. So until the county and TransCanada can agree on a settlement amount.
Whites says, “Hopefully it will be satisfactory enough to have the contractor come and gravel this again.”
The road is left a muddy mess and all Ron Whites can do is wait and hope there are no more hold ups.
Transcanada representatives and the beadle county highway supervisor both say they are in negotiations right now. TransCanada says they expect a settlement to be made in the next couple of weeks.
Tagged with: keystone, south dakota
