Weeks into B.C.’s ongoing wildfire crisis, highway closures are starting to cause major headaches for B.C.’s trucking industry.
With crews scrambling to contain fires, closures on key routes like Highway 97 5-A have sliced up the province.
Matthew May is Vice President at BST Transportation Group, which ships groceries and goods into many interior communities.
He says they’ve had to find alternate routes, some involving long detours.
It’s not all bad though. May says despite the challenges they’re managing to keep clients supplied, and have even assisted with some deliveries for the Red Cross.
But others haven’t been so fortunate – many truckers in the logging industry are forced to wind down while the fires burn.
Greg Munden, who runs a third generation logging truck company based in Kamloops said his forestry crew has been off the job, while his drivers are only getting sporadic work.
He says their families are feeling the pinch, and it’s bad news for the company’s bottom line too.
“You really can’t get back the days that you lose in logging and forestry. We’ve got a finite year as it is, 190 or 200 days just because of weather. And so if we lose 20 or 30 days it generally equates to about 10 per cent of our year.”
And that pressure won’t be alleviated until the fires are fully contained.
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