Babine restarts part of mill

Lakeland Mills is not the only lumber facility that restarted its planer equipment this week.

Babine Forest Products in Burns Lake has also resumed work at its planer mill to finish processing the stack of semi-complete lumber at their sites.

Both facilities saw deadly explosions at their sawmills earlier this year that put their planer mills out of operation. The planer mills are now working through the remaining sawmill lumber.

"We had about 14 million board-feet of lumber already cut, so we'll be operating to the middle of June to do the planer run and get the lumber shipped," said Steve Zika, CEO of Hampton Affiliates, owners of Babine and sister mill Decker Lake Forest Products across town in Burns Lake.

Zika was in Burns Lake on Tuesday and Wednesday from corporate headquarters in Portland, Oregon. "Starting the planer run is one of the reasons I was up at Babine. I wanted to smell the wood and see the workers."

About 40 people are temporarily back at work at Babine, to dry the lumber, plane it, do cleanup duties, and a few are involved in shipping the mass of logs that were stacked beside the sawmill waiting to be cut into boards. Zika had to find other mills to buy the logs and the transportation is now underway.

"The sales process was several months ago. It was difficult, mentally, to think of selling off your inventory, but the process is going okay," he said.

At Lakeland, the logs are still in the yard, but downtown Prince George is once again smelling the dust of lumber milling. The planer there has been operating since Monday to process the estimated seven million board feet of rough lumber on site. There is another five weeks of that work for about 22 Lakeland people.

On Wednesday the Lakeland sawmill site was officially turned back over to owners Sinclar Group Forest Products Ltd. Lead investigation agency WorkSafeBC told them the evidence collection process was finished, but the analysis of the data was still far from complete.

It took three months for WorkSafeBC (and partner agency BC Safety Authority) to release the Babine site back to Hampton. Zika wondered if their experiences at the Babine site in any way sped up the process for the Lakeland investigation, since many of the forensic people were involved in both probes.

Zika was briefly in Prince George on Wednesday but was unable to have personal meetings with Lakeland personnel, but Sinclar's president Greg Stewart confirmed they had talked in the past about their two similar incidents.

"I don't know if I'd characterize it as 'comparing notes' but there were conversations with Hampton, and many other forest industry officials for that matter, to discuss the unusual situation we find ourselves in," Stewart said.

"When you think of sawmills, as a mill owner you think of safety risks to workers, and how to mitigate that, but this - an explosion and fire of this magnitude - you are not prepared for," Zika said. "I wish we could all know what happened already, and be addressing that as an industry, but we still have to wait for the investigations to come up with the answers. They [WorkSafeBC] have been pretty transparent on their process. I know they are doing some testing of dust, and a lot of other analysis, but we as a company don't know anything that everybody else in the public doesn't know."