CALGARY, Alberta — Alberta has run short of steel, concrete and lumber as its unprecedented construction boom gathers speed. Now, the latest crisis has arrived: a dire shortage of portable toilets.
Across the province, orders for portable commodes are backing up as residential and commercial construction sites — particularly in booming Calgary — corner available supplies, leaving latecomers such as outdoor entertainment festivals scrambling.
"The whole city is very, very short," said Joyce Friend, manager of the portable-toilet unit at Budget Waste Inc. in Calgary. The company has already doubled its stock of toilets, but 400 of 450 are rented out to construction sites, leaving only a handful for outdoor summer events.
Friend said another 250 are on order, with the prospect of new units leaving her fielding a flood of calls from desperate customers.
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"I have been very popular," she said.
There is a similar shortage of trailers used as temporary offices by builders, and as dressing rooms by entertainers.
Calgary's outdoor Shakespeare festival has yet to find the trailers it needs as dressing rooms and for storing props, costumes and sound equipment during its August productions.
Alix Woods, business manager of Mount Royal College's Shakespeare in the Park, started looking last month for trailer rentals, but so far has had no luck. "I've been driving around looking for Rent Me signs, as bad as that sounds," Woods said.
The nonprofit group, which paid $800 last year for two trailers, is now on waiting lists. It has looked into buying sheds or setting up tents and ruled out renting a recreational vehicle after it got a quote of $4,500 for the month.
The Calgary Folk Music Festival has had similar trouble in finding trailers, which double as dressing rooms for its performers. Production manager Dean Warnock said the festival might be forced to rent RVs or put up tents, which aren't ideal, but she's trying to stay positive about the trailer shortage.
The Shakespeare festival also had a tough time scouring the market for enough portable toilets, at first confronted with a price four times higher than last year. Woods got lucky, however, finding a company with two free units for only about 10 percent more than last year's rates.
There's a similar story among vendors of trailers, or "modular units" in industry parlance, which are riding the highest crest of demand ever seen.
"It's unprecedented in the history of our company," said Michael Shaw, managing director of global enterprises at Atco Ltd., and the president of Atco Structures, the modular-unit group.
Shaw said his company has rented out nearly its entire stock of modular units, for the most part to the energy and construction sectors. The company's three-year forecasts don't contemplate any slowdown in that demand.