‘What a glorious day’: White City fire chief praises Regina Bypass project

Like a preacher leading his flock, multiple times during his remarks in front of the ceremony to mark the completion of the Regina Bypass, White City Fire Chief Randy Schulz entreated the crowd to together say “what a glorious day.”

Schulz is celebrating the opening of the bypass, praising what the first phase did to improve safety on the Trans-Canada Highway east of Regina.

“Before the bypass, I was on a first-name basis with the coroner’s office … But now, since the bypass, we haven’t used our Jaws of Life at all,” Schulz said Monday.

Schulz is a parent and in his remarks he joked that, as his kids have been coming up to driving age, it feels like the bypass was done just for him.

He said that in 2017 his department responded to 32 crashes, in 2018 it responded to 31 crashes, and in 2019 it has responded to only nine. Though there were 31 crashes in 2018, Schulz said the severity was down to nothing.

“That’s huge for people. In the past, we’d jump on an accident scene and you just see where a good person made a bad decision and it cost lives, just that simple,” explained Schulz.

But now that there are far fewer intersections that come right up to the highway, Schulz said emergency personnel aren’t seeing those crashes.He said the changes have taken away the opportunity for people to make that bad decision.

The bypass was marked as finished on Monday, but the new portions won’t be open to traffic until Tuesday evening so crews can finish moving barricades and uncovering signs.

10 things to know about the Regina Bypass

• It’s the largest infrastructure project in the province’s history
• There were 17 million cubic metres of dirt involved, 12 times the amount moved in the Big Dig at Wascana Lake
• The construction called for the use of 26,000 cubic metres of concrete, or enough to fill 2,600 cement mixers
• More than 1,400 kilometres of rebar were used, or enough to stretch from Regina to Calgary and back
• The project involved the construction of 12 new overpasses
• There are 40 kilometres of new four-lane highway
• There are 55 kilometres of new service roads
• It involves a new pavement design that should require fewer “functional overlays” over the project’s life
• There was only one time-loss injury in the five million hours worked on the project
• The project reportedly cost $1.88 billion