Canada\u0027s busiest port essentially stops loading grain ships whenever it rains in Vancouver — and that happens about 165 days a year. Read on
“Pretty much everybody else in the world loads in the rain,” said John Heimbecker, chief executive at Winnipeg-based Parrish and Heimbecker Ltd., the country’s largest flour miller and one of its top grain exporters. “So you’d be thinking that between everybody, we could clean that up.”
Rain pooled on the tarps and the stevedores had to climb onto the hatch covers to pull off the tarps without spilling water onto the cargo. In doing so, they risked slipping on wet metal and falling 10 to 20 feet into the ship’s hold. It also requires stevedores to be on top of the hatch cover, running the same risk of falling as the previous method. International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada members have repeatedly refused to work with feeder holes without some sort of apparatus to protect them from slipping and falling off the hatch cover.Article content
She sided with the union, ruling that employers need to set up guardrails to protect stevedores from falling off the hatch covers while loading grain in the rain. Employers protested, saying the guardrails take too long to set up. The arbitrator, however, found it takes less than half an hour to set them up, and about the same time to tear them down.Casey McCawley ran West Coast operations for Parrish & Heimbecker until he retired last month.
If you’re lucky, the weather breaks quickly and the terminal can catch up. In Vancouver, however, the rain can drag on for days at a time, especially during the rainy season between November and January, which happens to line up almost exactly with Canada’s peak grain exporting period. “We all are concerned about safety. We want our employees to be safe,” McCawley said. “It’s not really a safety issue. We can use technology to load through feeder holes and ensure there are no men on top of the hatch covers.”
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