Rankin Inlet gas outage ends after two days
GN confirms fuel shipment arrived in hamlet. offloading has begun
Rankin Inlet will soon have fuel again as the Department of Community and Government Services made a delivery Tuesday. (Photo by David Venn)
Rankin Inlet has received a shipment of fuel, ending a two-day gasoline outage, Nunavut’s Department of Community and Government Services announced in a news release Tuesday.
The department asked residents to continue to conserve gas until the petroleum products division has the chance to offload the fuel, spokesperson Suleikha Duale said in the release.
Around 5 p.m. Tuesday, in an update CGS said the connection to the tanker had been made and offloading has begun.
“Retail sales are expected to resume as soon as a sufficient volume of gasoline has been transferred,” the release indicated.
In an interview, CGS Minister David Joanasie said high winds and ice were part of the reason why the hamlet wasn’t able to receive the shipment sooner.
He said Rankin Inlet will get about 20 million litres of ultra-low sulfur diesel, gasoline and Jet A fuel. Two to three million litres of that is gasoline, and will be offloaded first.
CGS has dealt with other fuel-related issues this year. In August, Pond Inlet, Grise Fiord, Resolute Bay and Arctic Bay were affected by fuel shortages.
“Our fuel resupply has been not ordinary,” Joanasie said.
“There’s been a few communities that have experienced either shortages or outages of fuel, and that has had kind of a bit of a domino effect, in essence, because there’s been either ships being diverted to other communities or that sort of thing.”
Joanasie said one factor has been the lack of storage availability in some communities and the ripple effect from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic drove down the use of gasoline, which affected the amount of fuel the GN ordered.
To prevent that from happening again, Joanasie said, the GN ordered 12 per cent more fuel for next year.
This is some bad managers doing this job they never did should not do again multiple village’s not enough off what they need seems to come from one person if not hire
People who what there doing wow
This hurt my brain trying to read.
At least he is trying to write in english, in what is obviously not his first language.
Bravo to those who try. Better than a couch critic like you.
This never happened in Rankin Before. Many communities ran out of fuel this year. Poor management somewhere and the person or people responsible should be held accountable for this mess. Hugely inconvenient for communities and outright dangerous too. Our search and rescue cannot operate, people cannot go and tend their nets, harvest caribou, go seal hunting, taxis and school buses cannot operate. simply not acceptable!
Too many chiefs not enough Indians to do the dirty work