Carrier Lumber Ltd. won’t be felling any trees in the Robson Valley this winter, as the company sells off lumber it purchased from the burned up Lakeland Mills sawmill in Prince George.
An explosion at the mill destroyed the plant and killed two workers in August 2012. The company sold the wood remaining in its woodlot to Carrier Lumber – some 150,000 cubic metres.
“This will take us into next year,” says Carrier Lumber President Bill Kordyban. “There was quite a bit there and it displaced a lot of our other plans.”
“We have no harvesting plans for this winter.”
Lakeland also had standing timber inventory that needed to be logged, so Carrier also took that over for them as well, adding more to the stock.
As a result, contractors usually employed by Carrier in the Valley will not have that work this winter.
Kordyban says they will continue to do silviculture in the Valley – things like surveying and tree planting in order to get logged areas to a mandated “free to grow” state.
Kordyban says they had planned on doing some harvesting in the Valley, but the mill explosion changed that. They have harvested some pine beetle kill in the Valley recently, but have now completed the work.
Even though this winter won’t be fruitful for this area, Kordyban says it’s temporary – they are simply postponing their activity.
Their operations have become more sporadic as a result of all the special circumstances like the Lakeland Mill disaster, changing markets and the Pine Beetle, he says.
“You have so many of these anomalies occurring, that I don’t think there is a ‘normal’ anymore.”
Carrier Lumber Ltd. is a logging company based in Prince George and employs over 200 people.
