Plum Creek to curtail manufacturing operations

Plum Creek Timber Co. will begin shutting down its Montana manufacturing operations over the next few weeks, due to a lack of raw material related to the ongoing fire danger.

By William L. Spence
The Daily Inter Lake

Hank Ricklefs, Plum Creek’s vice president of manufacturing production, said the temporary curtailments will affect about 1,200 employees.

"We met with employees last Friday and gave them our best forward look as far as operations in September," Ricklefs said Monday.

"Right now, it looks like the Pablo and Ksanka mills will be out of wood in early September. The Evergreen sawmill and plywood plant will run out in mid-September and the Columbia Falls mill and plywood plant will run out at the end of September."

The medium-density fiberboard plant in Columbia Falls, which uses sawdust and shavings from the other plants, will probably run out of material near the end of September, he said. A scheduled fall maintenance shutdown may be moved forward to minimize the overall down time.

The closures are entirely related to dry conditions in the woods, Ricklefs said.

Because of the extreme fire danger, Plum Creek voluntarily ended any harvesting activities at the beginning of August.

To conserve what raw material they did have, the various plants all scaled back their production by 10 to 50 percent. However, it looks like they still will run out of logs before harvesting can resume.

"They’re all going to hit the wall at different times," Ricklefs said. "We don’t expect to get back in the woods before mid-September, and once we do get back, it isn’t something you just turn on and off. We have to refill the pipeline."

He said Plum Creek has looked at other options, such as bringing logs in by rail, but the other areas in the Pacific Northwest where the company could obtain logs also have been hit by fire restrictions.

The only facility that will be unaffected is Plum Creek’s remanufacturing plant, which does finger-jointing.

"It isn’t directly log-dependent," Ricklefs said. "It can get by using low-grade lumber and will continue to run."

Plum Creek experienced some minor interruptions during the 2000 fire season, but nothing of this magnitude, he said. "I doubt we’ll be back to full production before sometime in October."

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/NewsEngine/SelectStory_AD.tpl?command=search&db=news.db&eqskudata=10-815132-27