Propane delivered in Churchill, more on the way with rail repairs in limbo

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This article was published 17/07/2018 (3008 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — The provincial government’s summer shipment of propane to Churchill is expected to cost $1.1 million, the Free Press has learned.

Mike Doyle, Superior Propane’s Prairie district manager, said in an interview that the province started planning its second fuel shipment in late March. The 24 containers arrived July 6, a week after the town declared emergency rationing.

The roughly 450,000 litres of propane from that shipment have since been placed into local fuel tanks, and will be used to heat the homes of residents, who lost their railway lifeline in a May 2017 washout.

Superior Propane also says last October’s fuel shipment is now expected to cost roughly $5.5 million, instead of the original $6 million estimate. That first shipment involved 122 containers, amounting to 2.2 million litres.

The boat that arrived this month with the second shipment is scheduled to visit seven Inuit communities before it returns to Churchill July 30. At that point it will pick up all 146 propane containers from both shipments, taking them to a Montreal port on Aug. 9.

They’ll be used for a third shipment, a contingency plan that was put into action just a few weeks ago.

Ottawa pledged May 30 to restore rail service “before winter 2018,” but propane shipments take months to arrange, and no shovels have hit the ground.

“It isn’t very clear whether the rail is going to be opened in 2018,” Doyle said, adding that this week his firm plans to book its third shipment, which will arrive by early November. “We have to plan, to take care of Churchill, through to July of ’19, at this point.”

Doyle said that co-ordinating a propane shipment is fairly complicated, because it involves sourcing containers that are in demand from other companies, and those who lease propane containers usually only do so on a two-year basis.

The initial, October 2017 shipment arrived in Churchill despite flooding in Texas that slowed down getting containers from Houston, and a fire on a boat that was transporting some empty containers to the Montreal-area port.

“It certainly was a challenge to obtain the required (containers) but that’s where our logistics people really worked hard, diligently, and achieved the number,” Doyle said.

Still, Churchill residents have been wondering how the town nearly ran out of propane this month. On June 29, the town issued an “emergency public notice,” asking residents to ration their use of “critically low” heating fuel until the next shipment was scheduled to arrive two weeks later; ice melt allowed it to instead arrive within a week.

That shortfall occurred despite a decline in both the town’s population and its Northern Lights tourists. The provincial government did not explain the shortfall at the time, citing the media blackout in place before Tuesday’s byelection in St. Boniface.

“One can only ask: ‘How on earth did that happen?’” Sen. Patricia Bovey said after visiting the town in early July, when the temperature was 4C.

Doyle said Superior calculated the shipment based on an average of how much propane the town had bought from the company over the previous four years.

“I really don’t believe there was a gap,” he said, noting there was still 64,000 litres available as of late June. “It was very tight, however the numbers did work, and it was successful.”

It’s unclear whether the cost of shipping propane has hinged on other customers using the same boats. The shipping firm NEAS co-ordinates the sea lifts, which have been used by Calm Air’s parent company to bring jet fuel to the town, and Via Rail paid the firm $326,000 to bring down its rusting rail cars on the same boat that delivered the first propane shipment.

In October 2017, Omnitrax had the engineering firm Aecom outline an interim temporary, 30-day fix to the railway that would “restore only restricted service” so that “emergency supplies/provisions” through the winter. That would have required immediate construction and add between $5 million and $10 million to the estimated $43.5-million cost of fixing the line in whole. Ottawa claimed that plan wasn’t logistically possible.

The provincial NDP has criticized the Pallister government for moving ahead with a third propane shipment, saying it was the right choice but might have been avoided if the province pushed harder for a solution; Pallister has noted that talks with railway owner Omnitrax are under Ottawa’s control.

Meanwhile, the Pallister government also cited the byelection blackout for not answering whether it’s applied for federal assistance to cover the cost of any of the propane shipments.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca