The weather up until last week was helping the rebuild of Lakeland Mills.
The ground on the new mill was broken on July 22 and so far no major hiccups have occurred, as the first quarter is coming to a close on construction.
"The rebuild is going well," said Greg Stewart, president and CEO of Sinclar Forest Products, principal owners of the Lakeland operation.
The Lakeland sawmill facility was destroyed by a massive explosion and fire on April 23, 2012. The planer mill, company offices, district energy system and other company infrastructure survived the blast but Sinclar had a decision to make over rebuilding another lumber factory.
The provincial government and various investigational agencies have yet to disclose their conclusions as to the cause of the 2012 disaster, which killed two and injured more than 20 more, but the company nonetheless chose to move ahead with a rebuild.
"From a weather perspective we have been fortunate with such a mild fall," Stewart said. "We had a little bit of an issue with preparing the ground for foundations but we are still on track and optimistic that fall 2014 will be our startup date."
He said the long gap between the fatal blast and the first day of construction gave Sinclar officials time to research the construction process. "We feel comfortable around the availability of materials and labour."
What isn't understood yet, however, is whom will be on staff when the mill reopens. Stewart said many from the previous crew are still involved in therapy and other recovery processes that might keep them off the new crew, so considerations are already underway to deal with those eventualities.
More certain is the demand for Lakeland lumber. "We think there will be a very receptive market for the products that will come out of Lakeland," Steward said.
Anyone wanting to see the progress of construction can do so by watching the on-site webcam available at www.sinclar.com/lakelandmills.
THE MILL NEXT DOOR
Adjacent the Lakeland Mills campus, sprawling between the CN tracks along First Avenue and River Road alongside the Nechako River, Sinclar Group Forest Products has another massive mill property. It, too, is non-operational at the moment.
The former site of the now defunct Winton Global operation (the company still has an operational division that builds manufactured homes on the north side of the Nechako River) has its own set of buildings and industrial infrastructure. It also has a dormant sawmill at Bear Lake, north of the city.
The River Road property has a planer, kiln, finger-joint facility and head office as its primary structures.
"There is a lot of hardware. There is a lot of material, equipment, sitting idle until we figure out what to do with it," Stewart said. "We are evaluating now what the best opportunities are for that property and that equipment. There are a number of parties that have expressed interest in those properties, but whether we select one of those or find some use of our own, that is what we have to assess."
Winton Global was once known as The Pas Lumber. It shuttered its operations in 2008 due to the U.S. construction industry collapse. In 2011 it was announced that the company was officially ceasing operations, ending almost 60 years of production. In its final solvent days it was producing about 300 million board-feet per year of dimension lumber.
"When we shut that mill down indefinitely in June of 2008, we had every hope and desire to reopen that mill after we had made it through the initial downturn," Stewart said. "We never expected the economy to struggle as deeply and as broadly as it has."
Consideration was given to firing up the mothballed mill after the Lakeland fire, but the equipment just didn't work to make the lumber Lakeland customers were buying and there were no viable customers for the kind of lumber the Winton facility was capable of making.
He reiterated this week that those factors have not changed.
"We have not made any decisions around what's going to be happening at Winton but restarting Winton is not one of those possibilities. We are looking at what the best uses of that property will be on River Road and at Bear Lake. We hope to have some resolution on that in the next 12 months."
