A staggering feat - not

I was driving home, enjoying the speed bumps on the detour created by the soon to be completed Wine Trail upgrade in West Kelowna.

Between bumps, I began to reflect on the overall project. What a staggering feat of engineering and construction is nearing fruition on our doorsteps. Only seven short months to complete the huge 1.2-kilometre distance the new project encompasses. 

As I thought about this lofty achievement, I began to compare it to other monumental engineering milestones that have taken place in human history.  

My mind quickly went to the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Great Wall of China or the Channel Tunnel, but I thought that comparing the Wine Trail to something closer to home would be more appropriate. The Trans-Canada Highway?

A little math is in order. 

The Wine Trail team was able to build 1.2 km of roadway in seven months – a rate of 1.0 km every 5.8 months.  The Trans-Canada Highway is 7,821 km in length. Therefore, if the Wine Trail team had been hired to build the Trans-Canada Highway, and they worked at the same prodigious clip, they would have been able to complete the project in a mere 45,382 months or 3,780 years.

Of course, in order to be driving the Trans-Canada today, they would have had to start construction around the time the wooly mammoths were going extinct in Northern Canada. 

Bruce McWilliams, West Kelowna