B.C. FLOODING COULD BE CANADA’S COSTLIEST DISASTER AS CUT-OFF PORT OF VANCOUVER SNARLS SUPPLY CHAIN

“There have already been really dramatic and heartbreaking community level costs — you’ve got municipalities that have been hit really, really hard,” Fellows said.

Based on the latest data for 2017 and extrapolated forward, “I estimate roughly $300-350m is traded between BC and the rest of Canada per day by road or rail. That’s $2-2.5b per week,” Trevor Tombe, an economics professor at the University of Calgary, wrote on Twitter. “Not to mention vastly larger direct damages. This is massive.”

Goods arriving in Canada to be sold ahead of Christmas and staples such as food supplies will likely be stuck on ships and delayed in reaching store shelves.

“You’ve got product that is sitting in Vancouver harbour that can’t get out of Vancouver. It’s too late to redirect those ships to another port… and there’s nothing on the western seaboard that has capacity anyways,” said Michael Graydon, CEO of Food, Health and Consumer Products of Canada.

Canada’s mining companies, agricultural producers and commodities exporters also see delays in shipping their goods overseas, or will be forced to ship through the U.S.

Teck Resources Ltd, a copper and coal miner, said in a statement that it was diverting trains from Vancouver to a Prince Rupert terminal. Canpotex Ltd, the potash export company owned by Nutrien Ltd and Mosaic Co, will ship more of the crop nutrient through its smaller terminals in Portland, Oregon. and Saint John, New Brunswick, spokesperson Natashia Stinka said.

“There’s going to be more shortage than had already been expected,” Heaver said of the flow of goods into Canada as a result of the port being cut off from the rest of the country, adding the damage to roads and railway lines into Vancouver will add to congestion at the port and cause further delays transporting goods.

CP Rail chief marketing officer John Brooks called the western corridor the company’s “lifeblood.”

“Just about all commodities to some extent flow through that,” he said.

Both the country’s major railways said they had suffered damages as a result of the flooding but did not provide a timeframe for when the lines would be completely repaired.

CP Rail has deployed crews and equipment to the region and its engineering teams are working to repair damage to the company’s railway lines “as quickly as possible where safe to do so,” spokesperson Salem Woodrow said in an email to the Financial Post, adding there is no time estimate for when service will resume.

The head of Canada’s largest grocery chain also warned Wednesday the flooding in B.C. could further stress supply chains in the country.

“We’ll have to see, given what’s happened in British Columbia with weather over the last couple of days, whether that has any kind of incremental disruption. We suspect it will, but only for a limited time,” Galen Weston, president of Loblaw Companies Ltd., said on an earnings call.

Weston said ports in western Canada and the northwestern U.S. have kept Canada from experiencing the worst of the supply chain crunch the U.S. has experienced

If the problem persists another week, there is potential for another crisis in the form of a fuel shortage. The Trans Mountain pipeline system, which supplies 300,000 barrels of oil per day to the Vancouver region, shut down four days ago during the extreme weather.

Trans Mountain said in a statement Wednesday that it had conducted an aerial survey of the affected areas and more on-the-ground analysis is needed “to determine if there is work required to repair or re-establish protective cover where the pipe has been exposed due to flooding.”