In the wee hours of January 11, a neighour to the Steve’s Livestock Transport facilities in Blumenort, MB called in a fire to the local fire department and they responded around 1:30 am to find a truck barn on fire.
“One of our truck barn’s was on fire that housed 39 of our trucks and ended up burning down at a complete loss,” says Bill Rempel, vice-president of operations. “The investigation is still going on and the scene is still under the investigators control and we don’t have a cause of the fire at this time.”
Rempel says they own 145 units, and the loss of 39 units destroyed in the fire represents a third of their fleet. While they don’t know the cause, the fire commissioner’s office estimates the damage to be $11 million.
The company website says Steve’s Livestock Transport commits to their people, customers, industry, and leads the way in humane transportation of livestock. While livestock is a mainstay, SLT keeps expanding rapidly a fleet of dry vans and convertible freight trailers.
It’s impressive, says the company’s customers at how quickly things got back to full service and some kind of normalcy after this devastating fire that occurred on a Saturday, and Monday morning the transport company was back in business and never missed a load.
“It was a rough weekend for many people and a huge shock for employees and owners alike and wasn’t in our plans that weekend, either,” said Rempel. “We have extremely committed employees that are incredible and they stepped up first thing Saturday morning. When they came to work, the first thing they did was to identify what the company had lost and started getting replacements. There’s a lot of extra work that had to go into filling all of the orders for that first week.”
While grateful to the staff, SLT is also very fortunate to have the business community that helped them with trucks. Steve’s managed to replace all those company owned trucks with rental units and ended up buying a few that weekend enabling them to get back on the road Monday morning delivering all scheduled loads, he added.
“We feel very fortunate and very blessed we have such committed employees that worked all weekend to make this happen and to the businesses that helped us out,” said Rempel. “Replacing all lost units with rentals and several purchases also meant there were no people without work or jobs affects and everyone just kept on going. The drivers are very good at getting used to different trucks.”
While speaking to Rempel before the official outbreak of PED virus in Canada, he like most in the industry felt it was inevitable.
“We certainly have done much work in our washing and biosecurity protocols,” he says. “We’ve gone back to update them, check our protocols, to verify we are doing everything we should be doing. Absolutely it is a concern for us as a company and individuals and a concern for the entire industry.”
When asked what they’ve done as a company since the outbreak in the U.S., Rempel says they generally do what their customers want. Many of their customers have stepped up the washing, disinfecting and the drying of trailers after the washing.
“We’ve increased the capacity of the trucks and trailers that we wash and dry,” he says. “We have in place protocols on how drivers are to move around when loading and unloading livestock.”
Rempel says when the trucks come back to their yard, the driver parks the entire unit in a segregated ‘dirty’ area. From there they go through the wash bay and then into a ‘clean’ area, preventing any transmission of any potential problem.
One other question deals with the tough times in the hog business of the last five to seven years.
“We’ve tried to diversify from only hauling livestock, to hauling a little bit of freight, and for a period of time doing some reefer business, too,” said Rempel. “We’ve tried to stay diverse and do different things to keep our units rolling.” •
— By Harry Siemens