West Coasters were cut off from the rest of Vancouver Island after a rock blasting accident took out part of Highway 4 at Kennedy Hill on Jan. 23, 2020. It was a major inconvenience in a few years of inconveniences while the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure completed an aggressive realignment of the highway in that area.
In a front-page article in the Westerly News on Jan. 29, 2020, editor Andrew Bailey wrote about the fresh produce aisles going from "bleak to bountiful" after a lineup of delivery trucks arrived in Ucluelet and Tofino after a three-day closure while a bridge was installed over the rockfall.
Coincidentally, another more recent Highway 4 closure—this one at Cameron Lake east of Port Alberni—is in the news in March 2025. The Cameron Bluffs wildfire in June 2023 closed the highway completely for two weeks, with daily traffic disruptions until the end of summer that year. The chambers of commerce in Port Alberni, Ucluelet and Tofino jointly released results of an impact study showing a combined loss of $61 million in revenue that summer.
See more on this report at www.westerlynews.ca.
