Posting gains

Employees at Canada Post’s new St. Albert depot are digging their new digs.

Canada Post’s sorting and distribution depot in St. Albert moved from a strip mall on the corner of St. Albert Trail and Hebert Road to a brand new building at 230 Carleton Dr. in Campbell Business Park nine months ago.

The delivery centre processes mail for the city of St. Albert as well as the pocket of Sturgeon County using the T8T postal code.

Canada Post made the move to accommodate a new way of delivering mail in the city, said superintendent Sandy Dovey.

“We changed our delivery model,” Dovey says. “The main issue with the new postal system is that we used to have three people drive down the street – one would clear the red mailboxes, one would deliver parcels and one would actually deliver your mail,” Dovey says. “Now it’s a one-stop shop where you see one truck down your street and they deliver everything.”

At the old facility, Canada Post had a fleet of five trucks. Now there are 29.

“We were at the old little shopping centre there and you couldn’t fit 29 in there,” Dovey says.

The new 12,780-square-foot delivery centre includes a large, secure parking lot for the vehicles. It’s also designed for easier loading and unloading of the mail delivery trucks.

“There are safety features for the letter carriers loading,” Dovey says. “They’re not going up and down stairs, they drive right up and load.”

Dovey says letter carriers (also called delivery agents) in St. Albert walk an average of five to 15 kilometres a day carrying 35 pounds of mail in their satchels.

There are 16 community mailbox routes in the city and 29 routes that are door-to-door delivery.

One might expect electronic mail is on the way to wiping out paper mail, but that’s not the case locally.

“There is a little less volume,” Dovey says. “St. Albert is unique though because we do have a lot of people who own businesses out of their house so we still see it.”

Inside the open, modern warehouse facility are rows of cubicles not unlike many office spaces. But instead of computers and desks, these workspaces (called cases) are filled with rows of pigeonholes used to sort mail.

In addition to more space for the cases, a change in the sequencing of mail also came with the new building.

“Before, (letter carriers) used to have to come in and sort their case for probably three or four hours,” Dovey says. “And that’s really hard. It sounds like walking on the street is the hardest, but actually standing at the case is the hardest thing on your back because you’re not really moving. So now a machine sorts the mail for you.”

The bulk of the sorting is done at a plant in Edmonton and the mail arrives at the depot in bundles in order of address, which cuts down on the sorting time for the letter carriers.

The St. Albert depot was designed not only with space and safety in mind, but also environmental consideration. The depot has been registered for LEED certification with the Canada Post Green Building Council, meaning it includes features like water efficient plumbing fixtures, planting of trees and shrubs and efficient ventilation.