The Village of Chase is welcoming the return of traffic along Highway 1 through the region.
Chief Administrative Officer, Joni Heinrich, says the week-long shutdown of the Trans-Canada didn’t have a major impact, but it does allow traffic and goods to flow again.
“We were able to get in and out, if we so chose, and able to get supplies in from the Kamloops area but anything that would be coming from the east, yes, we wouldn’t have been able to get any of those products and those supplies,” Heinrich said, on the NL Noon Report.
“We haven’t been in any serious situation where we are running out of food or milk or bread or anything like that. But I do know that some of the shelves and some of the shops were a little bit less supported because of the closure.”
The Trans-Canada reopened at 10 a.m. this morning, Aug. 25. It was shut down last Friday when the Bush Creek East fire rolled through the area and crossed over the highway into Turtle Valley.
Heinrich says she doubts the reopening of the highway will do much to support any significant increase in tourism for the tail end of the summer season.
“I would say, we are going to get a few dribs and drabs of people into the Chase area but the tourism industry in this whole region taken a huge hit with all this fire activity and will for some time,” Heinrich added.
The Thompson Okanagan Tourism Association told Radio NL it is working with the B.C. Government help ease the financial hardship tourism operators in the Interior are facing.
“People have now changed plans, made other plans, gone other places, made cancellations,” Executive Director, Ellen Walker-Matthews, said.
“Let’s deal with one thing at a time. The travel ban was the first thing we were trying to work on how that looked and what the possibilities were. Now we are at that next place – finding funds to flow into the businesses to help them and also finding funds to encourage people to come back.”
Highway 1 between Boston Bar and Lytton in the Fraser Canyon will remain closed through the weekend because of the Kookipi Creek fire, which crossed the highway and the Fraser River.
