A road and bridge used to connect a remote former quarry site and small cabin area will soon be demolished.
The provincial government announced Sept. 26 that Quarry Road and the Aberdeen bridge will be demolished by November, with work on the sites beginning later this month.
“Manitoba Municipal and Northern Relations confirms that demolition of Aberdeen Bridge and permanent closure of Quarry Bay Road, in the Millwater area of Lake Athapapuskow cottage subdivision, will begin by the end of October and is expected to be completed in November, weather permitting,” reads the announcement.
“A tender has been successfully awarded for the decommissioning of the bridge and road. To ensure continued safety, the public is advised to not approach the work site while the demolition process is in progress.”
Access to the road was shut down for good last December, with berms placed to make the road impassable and signs put up to show the road was closed.
A petition to the provincial government to reopen and/or refurbish parts of the road and bridge received more than 500 signatures, mainly from Flin Flon-area residents. The bridge and Quarry Road both lead to a boat launch used by residents of the remote cabin area Millwater, which is not accessible by road but accessible by Lake Athapapuskow. The boat launch is reachable by the road, but before the quarry to which the road leads - demolishing the bridge would make both unreachable by land vehicle.
Quarry Road runs south from an old section of Manitoba Highway 10, running near Paradise Lodge, down toward a now-disused quarry site about eight kilometres away.
The road also includes what is officially known as the Aberdeen bridge, a metal and timber bridge running high above Mistik Creek at the mouth of Payuk Lake. The bridge, which is a popular scenic area and spot used for launching canoes and kayaks, has no guardrails and a steep drop off either side into the creek below - that same steep drop claimed the life of a man in an accident back in 2010, which led to the province recommending the road and bridge be closed. Along with the lack of guardrails, structural concerns with the bridge have hastened the closure, which could make building guardrails difficult if not impossible without either heavily renovating or replacing the bridge.
In 2010, according to Manitoba Conservation documents, recommendations were made to either install new bolts to fix the bridge’s issues and adding guardrails (at a cost estimated at around $125,000) or to replace the bridge altogether with a prefabricated one (at a cost of up to one million dollars). Those recommendations come from well over a decade ago and there is no recent estimate for what would need to be done today to make the bridge and road safe for use.
