'Massive congestion' at the Saint John port has resulted in shipping delays
CBC
David Roberts couldn't exactly say his shipping container was lost in transit.
After all, he knew precisely where it was for more than six weeks — sitting idle on Saint John's waterfront.
Inside that shipping container are windows for his new home that's now well under construction. Roberts was able to trace the container's precise location since it left the European manufacturer, but the travel log came to an abrupt halt in Saint John in September.
"They're kind of just stuck there," Roberts said earlier this week.
It all started with a plan to build a super-efficient home in Pemberton, about two hours north of Vancouver.
Roberts, who recently retired from the software industry, said he felt it important to try to set an example for how homes can be built.
"It's one of these homes where it actually generates as much energy as it uses, and so hopefully it will inspire other people to do the same."
But in order to maintain the high efficiency of the building, it required special windows that he couldn't get in North America. He ordered about $150,000 worth of windows from an Austrian company and arranged to have them shipped inside a 40-foot container from the port of Hamburg to Saint John.
From Saint John, the container was to have been loaded onto a "well car" and transported by train to Vancouver. That cross-country trip, said Roberts, normally takes about six days.
The first part of the journey went as planned, with the container arriving at the port of Saint John on Sept. 25 and unloaded from the ship the next day.
And that's where it remained.
Meanwhile, snow has fallen in Pemberton and, without windows to seal the house from the elements and potential thieves, work cannot continue inside.
Roberts spent weeks trying to track down the issue. He contacted the international shipping company that he hired to get the windows from the manufacturer to the site of his $5-million home.
From everything he's learned, Roberts said "there seems to be apparently massive congestion at the container terminal, and what seems to be happening is that new containers are getting offloaded and put onto rail wagons, and the old containers are just sitting there. So it's almost as if they've been abandoned."
P.E.I.'s Public Schools Branch is looking for 50 substitute bus drivers, and it'll be recruiting at three job fairs on Saturday, June 8. The job fairs are located at the Atlantic Superstore in Montague, Royalty Crossing in Charlottetown, and the bus parking lot of Three Oaks Senior High in Summerside. All three run from 9 a.m. until noon. Dave Gillis, the director of transportation and risk management for the Public Schools Branch, said the number of substitute drivers they're hiring isn't unusual. "We are always looking for more. Our drivers tend to have an older demographic," he said.