Salluit residents may have to use jet fuel for heating

MONTREAL — Residents of Salluit are turning their thermostats down to conserve fuel because they don’t want to run out before their re-supply tanker comes back next summer.

According to the best-case scenario, they’ll still have to start using premium jet-quality fuel for heat by the end of summer. As a result, Air Inuit planes have already started refueling elsewhere.

But even if Salluit manages to scrape by this year, its fuel scrimping won’t stop tomorrow.

That’s because the community’s existing tank farm is simply too small for its growing needs.

“The community needs another tank. They’ve needed it for five years,” said Claude Savage, director of petrol distribution for the Fédération des coopératives du Nouveau-Québec.

Savage attributes Salluit’s increasingly tight fuel supplies to the community’s continual growth. Salluit’s population rose from around 800 in 1991 to more than 1,100 in 2000.

This means there are also more houses, more new buildings, and more vehicles around town than ever before.

Savage said the fuel shortage isn’t the result of bad planning by the FCNQ, either. The FCNQ is responsible for distributing fuel in Salluit.

Its plan to upgrade the tank farm was initially delayed as the FCNQ and the local landholding corporation haggled over the renewal terms of the site’s land lease.

As soon as this was settled, the FCNQ was ready to begin work on the tank farm last summer, but Savage then learned about a Quebec government study of avalanche risks in Nunavik.

This evaluation, prepared by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute for the Quebec government, found that several communities in Nunavik, including Salluit, are at risk of avalanches.

And it concluded that in Salluit the tank farms are especially at risk.

Salluit is located in a narrow valley at the bottom of steep slopes. Although the western hillside is too steep for much snow to accumulate, experts found the slope to be less steep in two locations above the oil tanks. They concluded that snow could accumulate there and be released in an avalanche.

The report recommended either moving the tanks, installing a series of supporting constructions to block snow slides, or building a concrete wall, 60 metres long by 5 metres high.

According to Quebec’s public security department, the provincial government will pick up the tab for fences, relocation or other measures recommended by the report when public property or the safety of citizens is directly affected.

But where commercially-owned property is at risk, the owners will have to pick up the tab.

The FCNQ wants to move the tanks a short distance away, to a former dump site, but the municipal council wants the tanks to be moved down the bay to a site that doesn’t have electricity or even a road so the tanks won’t block the view from the community.

The FCNQ doesn’t think it should have to pay millions of dollars for a road to reach the proposed site outside Salluit, although municipal authorities say they don’t have the money to build it.

“They suggested the other place, but it calls for infrastructure, and we can’t build roads,” Savage said. “There has to be a choice between two negative impacts. One is to lose the view, the other is to lack oil.”

So, the planned expansion of the tank farm in Salluit — which was scheduled for this summer — won’t even begin until the summer of 2002, and only then if everyone agrees on where to put the tank farm.

The Kativik Regional Government has become increasingly worried about the prospect of a community without fuel.

At its request, Quebec’s native affairs secretariat is organizing a meeting in March to reach a compromise on where to put the tank farm.