Alternative road needed

BARAWAGI is an emerging township located on the edge of the Waghi River.
Whether you go east or west on the highway, the beautiful gate at Don Bosco Chimbu Technical College located just on the roadside in Barawagi, stands as an imposing monument to the workmanship and resilience of the hardworking Catholic priests and their Bosconian students.
Don Bosco Chimbu Technical College at Barawagi is gradually evolving into a modern technical training institution with some of the best facilities you can find for miles around.
Barawagi in the Kerowagi electorate of Chimbu is located on the Highlands Highway approximately 26km west of Kundiawa town.
The stretch of the highway between Kundiawa and Mt Hagen goes through an area of high population density.
A conglomeration of high-covenant houses are presently being built by locals along the roadside villages as you travel east or west on the Highlands Highway corridor.
This frenzied house-building activity, as well as the intermittent flare-up of land disputes among close-knit family and clan groups along the highway corridor, attests to an inevitable fact: human population is increasing at an alarming rate.
Rapid population growth exerts a tremendous pressure on the Highlands Highway’s capacity to handle traffic. We need to build alternative highway routes in order to ease traffic congestion, as well as to allow the travelling public to use the alternative route in the event of a landslip.
One of the proposed sites for a parallel route on the Highlands Highway is a magnificent valley on the southern side of the current Kundiawa to Kudjip section.
Following the zigzagging contour of the Waghi River, this grassland valley of interlocking hills stretches from Mirane (on the outskirts of Kundiawa) all the way to Kup station and across the border into Sigmil and Tombil in Jiwaka.
We can build an alternative southern route through this magnificent valley as the soil here is geologically stable.
An alternative route actually branches off a main or existing route and runs parallel to the main artery, but the two parallels must converge at some point on the other side.
One of the convergence points will be at Kundiawa while the other junction will be at Pepik near Kudjip in Jiwaka.
The two parallel routes must converge at these two junctions.
Arriving in Kundiawa town from Lae, Mt Hagen-bound trucks can either proceed to Kudjip on the existing highway or the drivers can take the alternative southern route to reach the same destination.

Paul Waugla Wii
Wandi
Chimbu