It’s early Tuesday evening and the Fort McMurray Safeway is gridlocked with tired-looking shoppers, mostly men, absently loading carts with food. For the dozens of oil sands workers milling about the store, the fact that they are here means they have survived the marathon 2.5-hour, barely 100-km drive into town south along Highway 63, where mornings and evenings are marked by lines of headlights 10 km long. Tired, hungry, and utterly stressed out, they arrive here, to 10 log-jammed checkouts and a Starbucks line 12 bodies long. Welcome to boomtown.

At 40,000 sq. km, the Athabasca Oil Sands, located just north of the city, is almost double the size of Alberta’s two other oil sands developments, near Peace River and Cold Lake. All that sand — paydirt, the locals call it — is making Fort McMurray one of the fastest growing cities in Canada.

In addition to the billions of dollars being pumped into oil sands expansions — Syncrude alone plans to spend another $6.5 billion over the next few years — there are major housing and commercial real-estate projects slated. As many as six new airports are under construction, and dozens of other infrastructure projects are planned to outfit a town that busted through its old clothes three years ago.

For the trucking industry, all this growth spells turning wheels and booming business. Many firms report as much as four-fold revenue growth in as many years. Rates have almost doubled since 2002. But as veterans of the northern Alberta town point out, big growth has meant big challenges for trucking in Fort McMurray.

“We’ve seen a lot of changes over the past five years — and it’s not all good.”

D.B. Kidd of D.B. Kidd Transport Inc., a 30-truck gravel hauler that has run out of Fort McMurray since 1977, says oil is just about the only resource Fort McMurray has enough of. Everything else — drivers, mechanics, land, good roads — is in critically short supply.

“Labor is the number-one concern for trucking companies anywhere-times that by 10 up here,” says Kidd, who spends roughly double the time he spent three years ago in driver recruitment, in an effort to deal with 25-percent turnover rates.

“Finding the drivers is less of a problem than keeping them,” says Rita Gushue, general manager of the Fort McMurray branch of Dukes Transport Inc., a 24-driver firm based in the city for 28 years.
“We find them and train them, only to see them switch to the [oil sands] plants themselves.”

In fact, driver “slippage” to the major oil sands contractors is a major source of frustration for local truckers. Some oil sands companies are perceived to offer a better deal for workers, including free flights home, higher pay and better perks. Fleet owners say this drives up the already high costs of doing business.

In order to work on the oil sands, drivers are required to take a drug test and complete a two- to five-day safety and orientation course at the local community college at a total cost of roughly $500 dollars. That’s an investment which, one out of four times, is “gifted” by trucking outfits to major contractors a few months — sometimes even a few weeks — after a driver is hired.

“It’s a real challenge for us, and we’re working to offset it, but what can we do? That’s our reality up here,” says Gushue.

Many firms have bumped up their offerings in an effort to keep workers. Recently, Dukes Transport began a $400 monthly living allowance for drivers, for example. Paying for a driver’s accommodations is another common practice, though at $900 a month for a spot at an RV campground, it’s a costly one. And because as many as two-thirds of the drivers in Fort McMurray are from the Atlantic provinces, paying for flights home is another lure.

Few of the roads around the oil sands projects are paved, so maintenance constitutes another major and skyrocketing cost for local firms. Service calls start at $700, versus $300 in Grasslands, the next closest town south. Shop rates are at minimum 40-percent higher than in Edmonton and it’s not unusual for parts to be on back order.

Labor is the top concern for trucking companies
anywhere. Times it by 10 for haulers in Fort Mac.

In other parts of the country, a trucking outfit might just hire a mechanic and build its own repair shop. In Fort McMurray, it’s not so easy.

The city is literally imprisoned by its own wealth. Surrounded on three sides by muskeg, the only developable land lies to the north of the city, where the oil sands are located. That has made the costs of owning or leasing real estate prohibitive.

Tom Galloway, president of T Galloway & Son Trucking Inc., an eight-unit gravel operation based in Fort McMurray since 2000, bypassed the challenge by building a mobile repair shop in a trailer he keeps near the RV park where he, his son, and most of their drivers live.

A scarcity of land has kept trucking companies small. Quite simply, there’s nowhere to park the equipment that would allow firms to expand. According to D.B. Kidd, this has also kept firms highly specialized. “You can’t afford to have equipment you don’t use everyday,” he says. “As it is, there are companies up here that need three, four times as much space as they have to store trailers and equipment. But all the land’s earmarked for housing.”

Rick Johnson, president of Donatsville, Alta.,-based RJ Trucking Inc., an independent gravel operation, says the scarcity of land is as hard on drivers as it is on fleet owners. While the number of trucks operating in the city has, by some accounts, grown five-fold over the past five years, there is still not a single truck stop in the town. In addition, the lack of available housing has driven up costs so significantly — a mobile home on a small lot can cost upwards of $300,000 — that operators wonder, if, at the end of the day, it’s worth it.

“The atmosphere up here is so unstable for business,” Johnson says. “Is there opportunity? Yes. But some days you have to wonder if it’s worth it.”

Fort McCrazy, Fort McMoney, Fort McStress: Coming up with names for this partially-constructed city is a favorite pastime.

This is another one: Fort McSafety. Mandated by the big oil companies, enforced and adhered to with the grim, all-business briskness that Fort McMurrians seem to approach everything, safety is king in this industrial town.

“Safety is valued over production up there,” says Steve Black, an oil sands driver who arrived from New Brunswick three years ago. Speed limits are 30km/h and 70km/h on the oil sands and are strictly enforced. The list of things that can get a driver immediately and unceremoniously fired from a job is seemingly endless: Exiting his truck without a hard hat; not wearing an orange safety vest at all times; speeding — even a little bit; not having his headlights on; talking on his cell; rolling through a stop even in the middle of absolute nowhere, even where there is not and will not be another vehicle for miles and miles and miles.

Trucks are subjected to monthly, sometimes even weekly, safety inspections onsite. All vehicles must be equipped with buggy whips — lighted orange-flagged antennae that stick five feet in the air so the guys in the giant 797 extraction bucket trucks can see them.

But for all the emphasis on safety, there exist some glaring oversights.

Many operators claim logbooks are non-existent here. Stoppages by the Department of Transportation, while routine in other parts of the country, are rare in northern Alberta. In his three years in Fort McMurray, Steve Black has been pulled over once.

“HOS seems to not exist in northern Alberta,” says one fleet owner who asked not to be named. “It’s like it’s something that’s just getting lost in all the work.” One driver estimated he could regularly work 20 hours per day with little trouble. Combined with the city’s high payloads — drivers can make as much as $15,000 to $20,000 per month — the hamstrung reality of the trucking industry seems to almost negate the uber-emphasis on safety in the oil sands.

“Safety is only a convenience [for the large oil sands contractors],” says D.B. Kidd. “It’s a way of passing liability down the line.” Kidd estimates his office staff spends up to 25 hours per week doing safety-related paper work, costs unrecoverable through rates.

But despite the gridlock in Fort McMurray, despite the soaring costs and stressful working conditions, fleet owners report increasing competition from out-of-province trucking operations flooding to the area. It has veterans like Kidd wondering how long they can last.

“I’ve done well from the boom because I’ve been established here for a long time,” he says. “But with all the costs and the headaches up here? You have to wonder if the new guys are really gaining anything.”