Fuel

The Provincial Earthquake Immediate Response Strategy is British Columbia’s operational plan for the days after a major earthquake. Of the resources it calls critical, it sets one apart:

Fuel moves every other supply, carries the people who respond, and runs the generators under the buildings that have lost their power.

The same plan assumes the movement stops: “Road, rail, air, and marine transportation will be disrupted, and existing supply chains will be inoperable.” [1] That is written against the province’s primary planning scenario, a shallow magnitude 7.0 earthquake near Greater Vancouver. [1]

A pump is an electric motor. The till beside it is a computer and the card reader needs a network. A station with full underground tanks hands out nothing while the power is off, and neither does an undamaged station the delivery truck cannot reach.

In the first week, fuel arrives or does not arrive on two things: the power line that runs the station’s pumps, and the road the tanker comes down. What BC Hydro has published about how long power takes to come back is on the electricity page, and what the province expects of the roads is on the transportation page.

In November 2021 the province issued an emergency order restricting fuel purchases across the southwest of British Columbia. [4]

That was a flood, and a smaller disruption than a major earthquake would bring. It is still what a fuel shortage has looked like here: a provincial order setting a limit on what a person may buy.

A hospital is the clearest case of a building running on a generator. A generator holds hours or days of diesel, not weeks. When it runs low, somebody has to drive more of it there, over the same roads as everything else.

The new Surrey hospital and the new St. Paul’s, both still being built, each specify 72 hours of self-sufficiency for fuel, water and sanitary holding, in identical terms. [5] [6]

That figure lives in two project agreements. It is not a code, not a standard, and it reaches no hospital already open. What Vancouver General, Surrey Memorial, Burnaby, Lions Gate, Richmond or St. Paul’s on Burrard hold in their tanks is not in the public record.

The crews restoring electricity drive to the poles. The trucks carrying food run the same roads as everything else. Bulk fuel arrives at terminals and wharves on the same shoreline and the same delta soils as the ports. Every one of those movements needs the roads and bridges to be passable.

A service station needs the grid to run its pumps. The grid needs fuel to run the generators and to move the crews who bring it back.

The province plans on the routes being “damaged or only partially functional and operating at a much-reduced capacity for an extended period (weeks to months)”, and on the rail network being “largely unusable during the immediate response phase”. [1] Road and rail are the two ways fuel moves in quantity.