Pacific Northern Gas pipeline cut

General Forums Northern BC Forum
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From CFTK: cftktv.com/News/Story.aspx?ID=1292623

[quote]The supply of natural gas to Prince Rupert and Port Edward has been interrupted.

Pacific Northern Gas says it’s trying to determine what caused the interruption, and also to find out exactly where it happened, saying only it was “somwhere east of Port Edward”.

PNG has curtailed gas use to its industrial and heavy commercial customers in the Prince Rupert area. Residential, hotel and restaurant customers are not affected at this time, but further curtailments may be required as conditions change.[/quote]

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So the gas has stopped flowing for some?

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Ours stopped flowing last night some time. I have been trying to find information about it to no avail. I wonder what this will mean for schools tomorrow?

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Mine is still running. I have recently heard that it will be out for 5 days, apparently there was a big slide outside of diana lake. May take a drive out there to see if theres truth to it or not.

5

Yeah, our gas furnace stopped working this morning.

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The break was near Prudhomme Lake. Friend who works for PNG says that they hope to have repairs done tonight, depending on the weather and work conditions.

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Nothing about this on the PNG website. News updates would be helpful.

PNG

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Gas came back up on Summit just before 4:00, but who knows how widespread.

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Just saw some friends at a local restaurant, they thought their furnace gave up and were thinking about how they were going to arrange for a new one until we told them the gas was out. They were disappointed and upset that there was no communication regarding the situation.

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Whether it’s the city, CityWest or PNG, we seem to be rather poorly served as customers, a little information would have been rather helpful during the last 48 hours.

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BC Hydro does it right – website with a map, mobile site, RSS feeds that you can do anything with (I had it sending me text messages with updates). Lots of detail.

The great thing about having a good web presence is that you can point people to it instead of answering questions over and over again.

I totally get why Citywest and the City don’t use the web: first, I know you meant it as a joke, sandimas, but when I e-mailed the mayor, he didn’t reply by e-mail – he phoned instead.

So perhaps somebody does print out the internet for him. So yeah, they don’t post stuff on the web, because the web is only an afterthought. It’s just not their world. Hence the Mayor lamenting the death of The Daily News – where are we going to get information now? Well, one of the reasons The Daily News went away is that many people are getting their news elsewhere already.

Why doesn’t Citywest use the web more? I’m not sure – there are a lot of smart people working there, especially in the internet department. But perhaps it’s a bit of the same thing with the leadership – Mr. Brown’s famous “we don’t think anybody in town wants it” (texting and data services) quote may be indicative of the world that the Citywest leadership lives in. This is the company that has everybody’s e-mail address, but doesn’t know how to contact its customers with an update?

In my opinion, though, the problem in each organization’s internet presence is that they fear uncontrollable conversation. Buying an ad in the Daily News is the kind of conversation that is easy to control and keep focused. No embarassing questions from Justin Case or MiG to worry about :smile:

Citywest does have a twitter account: twitter.com/citywest_tweets – but taking a look at it, there’s no real conversation going on. The last post on there was in August, and it’s just a stream of one-way announcements.

The internet is all about conversation (cf. Cluetrain Manifesto from last century!), and if you’re not interested in having a conversation you can’t control, then why even try?

Meanwhile, yesterday was officially HTMF’s biggest day ever. We had more unique visitors in a 24 hour period than we’ve ever had. At one point yesterday, there were 197 people on HTMF at one time. We finished the day with close to 2000 unique visitors. Not bad for a day when most people in town didn’t have electricity for part of the day.

Even in the middle of the blackout, when nobody in Northwest BC had power, there were people visiting the site on their phones. You know, those phones that Citywest’s leadership didn’t think anybody really wanted (sorry, couldn’t resist!).

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… and if you bought an ad in a newspaper, perhaps you could influence the paper’s own editorial decisions. Maybe they won’t ask Prince Rupert or Citywest any hard questions and jeopardize their ad revenue. I’m sure that never happened at the Daily News.

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Has anyone heard whether the schools are going to be open or closed tomorrow?

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Cool. Great to hear we had our best day ever! :smile:
My daycare provider asked me if there is school tomorrow. I have not heard a thing.

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Darn, and I missed it as I didn’t get my electricity back until today.

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So what is the offical word… read earlier that the PNG Crew hoped to have the repairs done tonight…
Any update? Are the schools running?

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[quote=“rupertguy”]So what is the offical word… read earlier that the PNG Crew hoped to have the repairs done tonight…
Any update? Are the schools running?[/quote]

Well for what it’s worth, I know a plumber in town who does a some work with PNG and he told me that PNG had fixed the pipeline problem, and that they had already returned their service to places like the hospital, senior residences and such, schools too I imagine. The plan according to him anyways is that residential areas would be reactivated through the day tomorrow, so with a little luck it will be a nice hot shower for all by Wednesday.

If I come across some links I’ll throw them up here.

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My wife said that a PNG guy came to the door this afternoon to ask if we needed to have our pilot light re-lit. He apparently told her that they had fixed the problem.

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Thanks for the word:

What about cable is regular cable up and running yet?

20

I just re lit our pilot light on the furnace (have had to do that a few times over the years) and the furnace has fired up just fine.

Still have to figure out the hot water tank though, may actually get some professional help for that task not exactly sure about that one, better safe (and suffering a cold shower) than going kablooey I guess.

(five minutes later)

Ah what the heck, I threw caution to the wind and opened up the hot water tank too and hey there’s that little blue flame and we seem to have hot water so it’ll be a nice long hot shower after all.