Remote band rations food, fuel after barge destroyed

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/05/2022 (1008 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — A reserve on the shore of Lake Winnipeg has been forced to ration food and fuel after the barge that connects it to the outside world was destroyed in a fire.

“We are in a dangerous situation,” Poplar River Chief Vera Mitchell wrote in an email Tuesday.

A state of emergency has been declared for the Ojibwa reserve, 345 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

It won’t have road access until next year, and the airstrip is basically a gravel landing that can only handle small passenger aircraft, Mitchell said.

For decades, the fishing community of 1,200 has relied on a boat to transport its catch to Winnipeg and pick up essentials.

The MV Poplar River caught fire on May 6 while dry-docked at the Hnausa harbour, said Fisheries and Oceans Canada. The cause of the fire wasn’t given.

The band struck a task force with Freshwater Fish Marketing Crop., the federal Crown corporation that sells its catch and owns the boat, but another vessel wasn’t found.

CEO Stan Lazar wrote in an email that Freshwater will restore transportation, and that the schedule for repairs “has not been finalized. We are actively developing a plan to continue to support their needs in the interim.”

Officials recently told the band not to expect another boat until next year, meaning the community has no way to sell its catch or receive construction material and fuel.

The province has yet to extend the all-weather road on the east side of Lake Winnipeg to Poplar River. It ends at Berens River to the south. Improvements to the airport have been in discussion for years.

During the 2019 wildfires, it took three days of round-the-clock evacuations to get community to safety, Mitchell said.

“We were lucky we didn’t wait till the last hour, otherwise we would have had fatalities,” she wrote.

The band decided to declare a state of emergency because there’s no immediate solution. It announced an immediate rationing of fuel, limits on food supplies and an expected substantial loss of income for fishers.

“Our community is now without means to supply itself potentially until the next winter road seasons which stars in January of 2023,” the band wrote in a news release.

Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu said she hadn’t been briefed on the matter.

“We’ll always act on crises to support First Nations that have a variety of different emergency needs, whether it’s flooding or fires and in this case, disruption to transportation,” she told the Free Press.

Northern Affairs Minister Dan Vandal was also unaware of the situation.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca