By Artur Gajda and Rod Nickel
The port of Vancouver, Canada's largest, says that all rail access has been cut by floods and landslides further to the east, hitting shipments of grain, coal and potash.
Photo: 123rf.com
Two days of torrential rain in the Pacific province of British Columbia caused major flooding and shut rail routes operated by Canadian Pacific Rail and Canadian National Railway, the country's two biggest rail companies.
"All rail service coming to and from the Port of Vancouver is halted because of flooding in the British Columbia interior," said port spokesperson Matti Polychronis.
The Globe and Mail newspaper said a mudslide had swept cars off the road near Pemberton, some 160 kilometers to the northeast of Vancouver, killing an unspecified number of people.
"There were some fatalities that were discovered," it reported, citing local search and rescue manager David MacKenzie as saying.
MacKenzie and British Columbia police did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
The floods have also closed numerous highways, including all main routes to Vancouver, she said. Provincial authorities are due to brief media.
Vancouver's port moves $C550 million ($NZ 630 million) worth of cargo each day, ranging from automobiles and containerised finished goods to essential commodities.
The floods temporarily shut down much of the movement of wheat and canola from Canada, one of the world's biggest grain exporters. This is normally a busy time for trains to haul grain to the port following the harvest. This year, drought has sharply reduced the size of Canada's crops.
Smaller crops mean that a rail disruption lasting a few days may not create a significant backlog, said a grain industry source.
Del Dosdall, senior export manager at grain handler Parrish & Heimbecker, said he expected some rail service could be running by the weekend, although another industry source said he expected the shutdown to last weeks.
Photo: AFP
Floods have also hampered pipelines.
Enbridge Inc shut a segment of a British Columbia natural gas pipeline as a precaution.
The storms also forced the closure of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which takes up to 300,000 barrels per day of crude oil from Alberta to the Pacific Coast.
Copper and coal miner Teck Resources Limited said the floods had disrupted movement of its commodities to its export terminals, while potash exporter Canpotex Ltd said it was looking for alternatives to move the crop nutrient overseas.
Evacuations and rescue missions
Directly to the south of British Columbia, in Washington state, heavy rains forced evacuations and cut off electricity for over 150,000 households on Monday. The US National Weather Service on Tuesday issued a flash flood in Mount Vernon, Washington, "due to the potential for a levee failure."
Some areas of British Columbia received 20 cm of rain on Sunday, the amount that usually falls in a month.
Authorities in Merritt, some 200 km northeast of Vancouver, ordered all 8000 citizens to leave on Monday as river waters rose quickly, but some were still trapped in their homes on Tuesday, said city spokesman Greg Lowis.
Snow blanketed the town on Tuesday and some cars could be seen floating in the flood waters, which in some parts were still 4 feet high.
The towns of Chilliwack and Abbotsford on Tuesday ordered partial evacuations.
Rescuers equipped with diggers and body-sniffing dogs started dismantling large mounds of debris that have choked highways.
The landslides and floods come less than six months after a wildfires gutted an entire town, as temperatures in the province soared during a record-breaking heat dome.
- Reuters
