A shiny new building to house the community’s newest firetruck seemed to magically appear in Oak Bay this week.
What residents didn’t see was the months of planning and days of inching travel that the project manager figures is a “first of its kind.”
“As far as we know, there’s never been a modular building like this moved to the Island,” Miguel Melgar of Rangeland Truck and Crane based out of Airdrie, Alta., told the Oak Bay News.
The building actually arrived on a 46-by-5.22-metre, near-100-ton trailer operated by teams that routinely move oilfield equipment – lighter but larger, taller, wider loads on roads designed for moving mega machines.
When Oak Bay fire commissioned its new 105-foot rear mount aerial ladder truck, it was the best fit for community safety, but not for the heritage hall the department works from. Knowing that, Oak Bay sussed out options, whittling down to the steel structure built by Extreme Modular Buildings in Lethbridge, Alta.
The trip west required approvals from two provincial governments and every community the convoy crossed from Lethbridge to Oak Bay.
“Each jurisdiction along the route has its own stipulations on how and where we can go,” Melgar said.
The actual trip meant inching along, primarily between midnight and 5 a.m. For example, one small stretch meant getting approvals from Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Township of Langley, Langley City (two separate entities Melgar learned) and the City of Delta.
It starts with site visits, measuring, calculating, creating renderings and then modelling the route.
“Once we have the route then we have to have that surveyed and processed to take a look at what are the challenges along that line,” Melgar said. “We had to reroute quite a few times.”
Challenges included precarious balancing as the trailer crossed bridges, counterflow crossing on a Highway 19 ramp and traffic stoppages including Highway 1. It included clearing streets such as Monterey Avenue of cars for the endeavour.
Handling intersections such as Fort and Foul Bay or Monterey at Oak Bay avenues are roughly 20-minute turns.
“The streets in Oak Bay are very, very narrow," said Melgar. "In some sites, we were the size of some of the buildings we were moving along.”
Plans for the move started in earnest late last fall, Melgar said, and it officially left Lethbridge on July 4, moving at night through to July 16 around 4 a.m. when it parked adjacent to the Oak Bay fire hall.
The entire team entailed about 100 people, from the fire department to heavy haul experts.
