When he’s not cajoling contractors, meeting with stakeholders or updating project timelines, the director of the Tilbury LNG Expansion project can be found sewing ribbons on ballet shoes and building stage props.
Rob Dunsmore is a Dance Dad. He spends weekends carting 15-year old daughter Hannah’s make-up caboodle to performances and practices. Work-life balance is challenging, since he travels twice a week between his home in Trail and FortisBC’s Operations Centre in Surrey, where he oversees the expansion to our Tilbury liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Delta.
It’s the first natural gas project he’s managed, having spent most of the previous 27 years working in FortisBC’s electric utility Generation Operations and Maintenance department in the Kootenays.
“I’ve gotten to know a whole new group of people and built new relationships,” Rob said. “There’s a new challenge every day, the phone rings and something’s going on, often reprioritizing your day. I’m still learning about the technical aspects of the LNG process, and that’s interesting.”
Milestones celebrated to date include touring former Premier Christy Clark through the site and raising the roof on the new tank. “I’m kind of a technical guy at heart, I was really interested in how they did that,” he admits with a grin. Rob and his team are looking forward to celebrating the completion of the project in 2017.
To date, more than 870 people have worked on the project, which has contracted goods and services from 140 locally-owned businesses.
