Businesses see benefit of barges

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While this past summer’s highway shutdown re-energized calls for a secondary road out of town, the Port Alberni Port Authority was able to prove the value of our natural marine highway.

Catalyst Paper was able to keep operating during the road closure by barging in pulp and shipping out loads of paper.

PAPA Vice-President of Operations Mike Carter says the barging of supplies allowed forest companies to see the economic value in short shipping.

“I certainly believe the economy of scale would tip it in our favour to use the marine highway more,” he said. “Those numbers are being crunched constantly to make this work, but we do believe with the economy of scale, it’s very possible, and it should lean towards using the marine highway more. Other benefits are environmental as it takes so many trucks off our roads locally and the highway and then that just brings the emissions down tremendously so there there’s a lot of upside to using the marine highway as opposed to trucking.”