With barge season scrapped, how big a solution is Buffalo’s 737?

“We’re really going to have to change the way we all think about doing business.”

Joshua Earls won’t be relying on barges to restock his Rampart Rentals grocery and hardware store in Norman Wells this summer. Who knows, maybe he won’t be relying on barges ever again.

For a second successive year, the summer barge resupply from Hay River to Norman Wells is disrupted. In 2023, the last barges didn’t sail. This year, record low water on the Mackenzie River means there’ll be no barges at all.

“That’s normally how we would get our goods up here,” said Earls.

“We’re now going to have to use Buffalo’s air barge.”

Ordinarily, losing the whole barge season would be cataclysmically bad for the Sahtu region and communities like Norman Wells, Tulita and Fort Good Hope.

This summer, losing the barges is still bad – Sahtu Secretariat chair Charles McNeely told CBC’s The National on Friday it would “probably throw us back a year” in terms of construction projects – but a couple of factors are cushioning the blow.

The first is Buffalo Airways’ air barge, announced earlier this month.

Buffalo is already a specialist at hauling cargo across the territory. Famed for its operation of World War Two-era planes to get much of that work done, the NWT airline recently bought its first jet aircraft, a Boeing 737 freighter.

That Boeing 737 is commencing regular resupply flights to carry goods and supplies from Yellowknife to Norman Wells – at discounted rates where possible. The airline is being hailed for the move.

The Sahtu Secretariat said it had sent Buffalo a letter of appreciation, while Earls said the prices seemed “fairly reasonable and they’re going to honestly help out significantly for the whole resupply of the Sahtu.” The region’s MLA, Danny McNeely, praised the company in the legislature.

Earls reckons using Buffalo will end up being 25 to 30 percent more expensive than a regular barge, which he concludes is “not as bad as you’d think” for the switch to air freight.

“Buffalo is really coming in to save the day here,” he said.

How is Buffalo doing it?

Normally, the Buffalo Boeing 737 does overnight freight runs between Edmonton and Yellowknife. That cargo is then distributed to Buffalo’s smaller flights and taken to various NWT communities.

“In the day, it’s available to do charters out of Yellowknife and Edmonton,” Buffalo business development manager Sandy Macpherson said of the 737. “We’ve got a second crew that can operate to Norman Wells and we can do two trips during the day, no problem.”

At a push, Macpherson said the aircraft could do eight to 10 trips a week to the Sahtu and offload as much as 400,000 lbs of freight in the process. In practice, he thinks the demand won’t reach anything like that level and flights once or twice a week are more likely.

“We’re definitely getting a few calls and emails. We’ll see what comes of it,” he said on Thursday.

Macpherson said the situation is helped by a few factors. The kind of freight that goes by barge isn’t often needed urgently or expiring in a hurry, otherwise it wouldn’t have been sent by river barge in the first place. That means there’s time to make alternative arrangements.

“Buffalo, for years, used Hay River as a hub. We know the customers that need to ship on barges, and often they ship on our other services too. It’s the same people, for the most part, that we’ve been working with for years,” he said.

“It’s freight that people plan a long time in advance and are hoping to move it using the least amount of money possible. We don’t match barge rates for all the cargo – we’ve got to make sure costs are covered – but this is the best that we can do. So far, we’ve been hearing some pretty positive responses.”

Low water ‘built into planning’

The plane won’t solve every problem.

Construction materials, for example, will still be an issue. Trusses for buildings are not going to fit in the hold of a Boeing 737. Nor is any heavy equipment or anything bigger than a Ford Explorer, although some items could feasibly be broken down into component parts and then reassembled on arrival.

But the plane also isn’t the only solution, infrastructure minister Caroline Wawzonek said in the legislature on Thursday.

Prior to the 737 becoming an option, Wawzonek said, the GNWT and communities had attempted to head off some of the freight logjam months ago, during the winter road season, because the likelihood of low water this summer was so high. (Much of the territory is in a multi-year drought and by the time the winter road opened, the absence of huge volumes of snow needed to fix that was apparent.)

Wawzonek said having low water “built into our planning” for the recent winter road season should avoid another fuel shortage in the Sahtu, like the one experienced in some communities half a year ago. Having some barges depart from Tuktoyaktuk and head south to Fort Good Hope, rather than north up the Mackenzie, will help too, she said.

“Délı̨nę, Colville Lake, they were resupplied additionally so they can get to the winter resupply in 2025 if they have to,” Wawzonek said in the legislature.

“That wasn’t our first choice but we already knew it would be a challenging year … at this moment in time, the communities for which the government is responsible do have enough [fuel] to get through to the winter season or will be getting their resupply this year.”

‘Crazy busy’ 2025 winter road?

Earls said the winter road season in early 2025 “becomes very vital” to operations at Rampart Rentals.

“We’ll have six weeks, pretty much, to bring in a year of supplies,” he said.

“The winter road is going to start being crazy busy. We’re just not able to rely on the barges any more.”

But scientists’ predictions and recent experience suggest winter road seasons might not be too reliable, either.

“How long will our winter roads last? We were lucky this year,” said Mayor of Norman Wells Frank Pope. (The Mackenzie Valley Winter Road connecting the Sahtu to the south was, if anything, open slightly longer than usual this past winter.)

“Our cost of living in the Sahtu is intolerable. We can’t take any more increases. Groceries, heating fuel and gasoline are ridiculously high,” the mayor told Cabin Radio.

“Accelerated construction of the all-season road from Wrigley to Norman Wells should be the number-one priority of the federal and territorial governments.”

For Pope and others, like Sahtu Secretariat advisor Todd McCauley, the barge season blinking out of existence is why building a permanent Mackenzie Valley Highway is their laser focus.

“Obviously, we’re going to see an increase in groceries and fuel costs and the cost of living up here,” McCauley said.

“People are appreciative of the fact that we’re championing this project. Everybody is supportive of the Mackenzie Valley highway.”