Newly twinned stretch of Highway 104 opens, bringing hope it will save lives

Friday was nine years in the making for Joe MacDonald.

After years of responding to fatal car crashes along Nova Scotia's Highway 104, MacDonald, the chief of the Barneys River Fire Department, started a lobby campaign in 2014 to have the stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway from Sutherlands River to Antigonish twinned.

Government officials were on hand Friday along part of the new highway to officially open the road. The final 12½ kilometres between French River and Barneys River will open next week.

"It's a wonderful feeling," MacDonald said during an interview on Thursday. "We pushed and pushed and this is reality."

The 38 kilometres of twinned highway is coming in on budget and slightly ahead of schedule. But MacDonald is less concerned about the $364-million price tag for the work, which included 24 new bridges, two new interchanges and 10 kilometres of entirely new road made possible by blasting through mountainous rock.

What MacDonald is more focused on is the fact that people are now travelling a much safer, less serpentine road.

"Hopefully, it will cut down on the deaths immensely," he said. "It's an unbelievable relief for everybody. We feel a sense of accomplishment and we're very relieved to see it's opening soon."

The Highway 104 project was one of four major twinning projects announced by the former Liberal government in 2017. Unlike the others, this one was done using the public-private partnership, or P3, model.

Peter Lauch, the design-build director for Dexter Nova Alliance, the consortium that built the highway, said the approach created an incentive to get the work done on time and on budget because any cost overruns or time-related penalties would have fallen to the company.

Lauch said the team benefited from past experience working on a similar project in New Brunswick.

This project comes with a 20-year maintenance contract that will see Dexter Nova Alliance paid $196.4 million over the life of the deal to maintain the road, handle all snow clearing, vegetation management and everything else related to the new highway and an additional 25 kilometres of previously existing highway.

"The province has nothing to do with it except make sure that we're doing what we said we're going to do," said Lauch. "It's all on us."

Along with wanting to hand a high-quality project over to the maintenance team, Lauch said the people working on the project had an appreciation for why MacDonald lobbied so hard to have the road twinned.

"This is a highway in Nova Scotia built by Nova Scotians. They have a vested interest in doing a good job. Parts of the existing highway were quite treacherous. So this was very important for the area, for the people travelling between New Glasgow and Antigonish, and a lot of those people were working on the job."

A spokesperson for the provincial government said the twinning projects along highways 103 and 107 remain on schedule to be completed later this year.

The twinning project on Highway 101, meanwhile, cannot be completed until the provincial and federal governments agree on the design for a new aboiteau as part of a new roadway that would cross the Avon River.