Public inquiry into the Red Hill Valley Parkway begins

The public inquiry into the Red Hill Valley Parkway began Monday.

The first day only lasted about an hour, but the commission outlined how the process will play out as the inquiry looks into how an important friction test report came to be buried.

In February of 2019, Hamilton city council was shown that a friction report of the Red Hill Valley Parkway’s surface was below U.K. safety standards but that report was generated in 2013.

During the six years, the report was buried, there were more than 200 crashes and four deaths on the parkway.

The city requested a $20 million public inquiry to investigate why this important information was kept from senior officials. The inquiry began in 2019 but the first day of public hearings was Monday.

Over the course of about two years, the commission council collected 135 thousand documents and interviewed 100 people including current and former city employees and staff from the ministry of transportation.

Industry experts will explain the science of asphalt over the next two days.

Rob Centa, the lead on the commission counsel says later in the week witnesses will start with the design and construction of the Red Hill. Centa said, “from there we will move to a fairly lengthy group of witnesses from the city and from the consultants retained by the city that will address the bulk of the questions that are posed in the terms of reference.”

Some of those questions include identifying everyone who received a copy of the report and why wasn’t the information provided to council.

The big question is, did the failure to disclose the report, contribute to accidents causing death on the Red Hill Valley Parkway? That is expected to be answered in phase 2 of the inquiry which begins this fall.

The commissioner will then make recommendations to the city on how to move forward.