Farmers fear the worst with no timeline for reopening barge-damaged B.C. bridge

Farmers on Delta’s Westham Island are scrambling to figure out how they’re going to get their produce to market with the bridge closed.

The Westham Island Bridge has been damaged worse than initially thought following Tuesday’s barge strike, according to structural assessments that were still in progress on Friday.

For the couple hundred people who live on the island, especially farmers, concern is growing about how long a repair or replacement could take.

“They need to go off the island every day,” Hugh Reynolds of Reynelda Farms told CTV News on Friday while discussing his potatoes inside a storage locker. “So we’ve lost three shipping days now.”

Reynolds is one of multiple farmers on Westham Island who normally has significant amounts of produce transported over the bridge on large trucks.

The City of Delta provided a barge trip on Friday to transport a certain amount of trucks and other vehicles.

But Reynolds estimated one barge trip would only be capable of transporting about 10 percent of the produce that would normally cross the bridge on a normal day, suggesting that arrangement isn’t sustainable—though he did express gratitude to the municipality for providing that.

Delta Mayor George Harvie said the details are still being worked out, but he hopes to increase barge capacity soon.

“Barges that will take small vehicles and be able make more regular trips, and then a large barge that would be really regulated in so far as high tides and low tides, that sort of thing,” Harvie told CTV News. “So we’re looking at both possibilities.”

Damage assessments continue with a dive team involved, but there are big questions about what’s next if the bridge, which is more than 100 years old, ultimately needs to be replaced.

“We’re in the early stages of planning a replacement bridge here and we’ve got funding secured for the design of that right now,” TransLink spokesperson Thor Diakow said Friday. “Further funding for construction would need to be secured at a later date.”

For Reynolds, he’s calling on all levels of government to help—as he fears the worst for the future of the bridge.

“(The) Delta manager last night, he used the word ‘condemned,’” Reynolds said of how bad the situation could be. “And they’re sending divers down to see whether the pilings are even connected.”

While people are still able to walk across, that will now be restricted to residents and other essential workers.

The Transportation Safety Board is sending investigators to look into what happened, and has identified the tugboat involved as Quadrant Partner.