Leader staff

The Leader did another count of heavy trucks last week – this time at the Hwy. 2 and Hwy. 88 intersection. Thirty rigs went by in a 15-minute window. Our vantage point was interrupted by a town grader with a ripper blade smoothing out the ice on the road that goes in front of Black Tiger Fuels, but we didn’t count the grader.

The rigs were split right down the middle – 15 on Hwy. 2 and 15 on Hwy. 88. The ones on 88 were of course also traveling on Hwy. 2, but for the latter we only counted the ones that stayed on the east-west road. Anything going onto or off 88 got counted as 88 traffic. Even more surprising was more log haulers on Hwy. 2 than on 88 (six to four). Some of this probably had to do with hauling out of Holmes Trail (the Flat Top Road) that was going on that day.

In counts we did last year, Hwy. 2 traffic was always less than 88. Not this time. In the Jan. 19 count, we got 16 trucks on 88 – so pretty much the same.

Breaking down the type of trucks, 10 were log haulers (empty or loaded), five were tank trucks and 15 in the ‘other’ category.

Assuming the traffic continues at a similar pace over 12 hours, that would add up to 1,440 heavy rigs going past Slave Lake. How many individual units – that’s tough to estimate.