Fuel Spill at Norfolk County

 With Norfolk County’s Energy Conservation and Demand Management Plan for 2014-2019 recently released we've had a chance to go over the numbers and the results are staggering.

You will know by now that we're not fan's of the Norfolk County Roads Department or Public Works by this point and the Fleet fuel consumption numbers just solidifies the fact that those departments are broken.  Some how these departments have used 140,000 more litres of fuel in 2013 than 2012.

Let's break it down in a better perspective than what Staff puts forth to Council.

So what could have possibly happened at Norfolk County fuel stations that required Fleet Services to have used 140,000 more litres of fuel from 2012 to 2013?

If we look at the fleet they have 203 vehicles on the roads.  85 pieces of equipment.
Fuel is purchased in bulk.


2013 Diesel Average Rate= $1.041/L
2013 Gasoline Average Rate= $1.089/L

2013 Diesel Consumption = 593,354 Litres
2013 Gasoline Consumption = 386,237 Litres

979,591 Litres of fuel burned

This alone produces 2971.86 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year.

70% of the Fleet are vehicles so let's assume they use 70% of the fuel.
685713.7 Litres for vehicles and 293877.3 litres for equipment.

A tractor trailer gets roughly 8 miles to the gallon or 35.3 litres per 100 kms.  We're using the vehicle that uses the most fuel and assuming it's the only vehicle type they have, which is clearly not the case.

All together each of the 203 vehicles drove 9569.12 kms.  Norfolk County has 3831 paved lane kms so each vehicle would have traveled every lane Norfolk County has 2.5 times.  In 2012 each vehicle would have traveled only 8205.53 kms.  What has changed?  Are we buying less fuel efficient vehicles?

On the same Energy Demand Plan it also states that Norfolk County Staff used their personal vehicles to travel a whooping 1,128,275.77kms!  The County was billed at $0.45 for each km bringing the total to $507,724.10.  A base price on a new Toyota Prius is $32,000 so Norfolk County could have purchased 16 news ones each year.

Norfolk County Staff total driving kms would be 28 complete trips around the planet or 295 trips on every lane on every road in the entire County!  There are 602 full time employees at the County so these numbers work out that each one of them drives 1874 kms for County business!  Do you believe that?

To bury the real cost from Councilors the Staff report only shows how many litres that Staff burned and shows the total cost in that perspective.  A $300,000 difference.  It would appear again that Staff is actually running the show at Norfolk County.  Councilors can only make decisions based on the data that is put forth to them.  We constantly find the data skewed and this is no exception.

It's fairly easy to guess where the fuel leak is coming from.