Highway 101 closed at Flume Road for twelve hours on 8 February 2025. The houses on it draw from wells, not from a regional main.
Where Flume Road sits, and the other places we attend
around Roberts Creek. Every name on the map is a link.
Six hundred and four metres in the road atlas, and a longer signed corridor
In the BC Digital Road Atlas, read on 12 September 2026, Flume Rd appears as four segments totalling 604 metres, all paved, classed as local and two lanes wide. In that dataset it leaves Beach Avenue at 49.43012, -123.66599 and runs north-east to meet Lockyer Road at 49.43382, -123.66005.
The signed corridor is longer than the mapped name. BC Parks gives its directions to the Roberts Creek Park day-use area as following Highway 101 past Roberts Creek and turning onto Flume Road, with the campground a further two kilometres along the highway. So people arriving here come off the highway at the top and reach the beach at the bottom, while the road atlas splits that run between two street names. Any figure quoted for the length of Flume Road should be understood as the 604 metres the atlas holds under that name, not the whole drive.
The first road on the OCP's well list
Section 13 of Official Community Plan Bylaw 641 draws the water boundary in one sentence. The regional system reaches only the part of the community lying below the Sunshine Coast Highway, and the bylaw then names the streets outside it. Flume Road is listed first, ahead of Lockyer Road, upper Roberts Creek, B&K Road and Largo Road, all of them recorded as drawing on private or community wells.
There is no SCRD main under this road and therefore no hydrant on it. Two consequences follow for a house standing empty. Water arrives by electric pump, so when the power fails the taps stop, and a frozen or split line upstairs will not be revealed by a meter reading because there is no meter. And a fire here is fought with whatever water the department brings in on the truck.
On 8 February 2025 the highway was closed at this junction for twelve hours
At about three in the afternoon on 8 February 2025 two vehicles collided head-on on Highway 101 between Flume Road and Roberts Creek. Three people were taken to hospital with serious injuries. Brian Twaites, the paramedic public information officer, was the named source on the incident. The highway stayed closed for twelve hours that day.
The detours published during that closure named four of the roads in this part of the Creek: Lower Road, Lockyer Road, and Beach Avenue approached by way of Marlene Road and Roberts Creek Road. A twelve-hour closure of the main highway at the top of a 604-metre road is not a traffic inconvenience for the properties on it. It is twelve hours in which nothing scheduled arrives and nothing unscheduled leaves by the usual route.
Trees, and the night the power went out with the road
On the evening of 19 November 2024 a windstorm put several trees across Highway 101 at Flume Road. The blockage was reported shortly after eight o'clock and the highway reopened by 10:15 p.m., about two hours and a quarter later. Roberts Creek and much of Elphinstone lost power from around 8:30 that night. BC Hydro described a strong windstorm and heavy rain causing significant outages in the area, and said some customers in the affected areas would be without power overnight.
Earlier, on 25 November 2021, Flume Road itself was reduced to a single lane along with Beach Avenue and Day Road. Roberts Creek Park, the provincial park reached from this corridor, was the route Beach Avenue residents used to get out during that emergency. BC Parks places the park 14 kilometres west of Gibsons and 12 kilometres south of Sechelt, in forest of large cedars, Douglas fir and hemlock. The park is run under contract by Swens Contracting.
That forest is also the fire context. The Roberts Creek department protects roughly 28.5 square kilometres, while Electoral Area D covers 143 square kilometres of land. The protected fraction is the settled strip, and the timber begins at the edge of it.
What a check on Flume Road covers
The well head, the pump house and the pressure tank, including the pump breaker after any outage
Whether power has been restored to the property, and what the freezer and the heating did while it was off
Heat holding through the house, or the system drained down with the well pump isolated
Doors, windows, sheds and the gate, with locks operated by hand
Pipes and fittings at the coldest exterior wall, since a burst here shows up only when somebody walks in
Trees leaning over the roof, the driveway and the service line, checked again after every windstorm
The driveway where it meets the corridor, and the ditch either side of it
Brush and cut vegetation stacked near the building, which can be burned lawfully only in two short annual windows
A dated photographic record of each item, filed the day the visit happens
Household policies normally set a limit on how long a dwelling may stand empty without inspection. The common form asks for entry by a competent person on a stated cycle through the heating season, in many cases at four days or less, or for the water to be shut off and the system drained. Because insurers word this differently, the frequency that protects you is the one your own policy states.
What it costs
A scheduled check at Flume Road is
$55 a visit, plus
$10 travel. The travel charge is the same
everywhere between Gibsons and Egmont. There is no minimum term and no joining fee.
See the full price list.
Where these facts come from
Every figure, date and quotation on this page was taken from one of these. They are
listed so you can read them yourself.
