Art: aerial photo of mackenzie pulp mill in IMG archive feb 19
Planning is already underway to find a way to restart the Mackenzie pulp mill, shuttered by a rupture in one of its bleaching tanks Wednesday afternoon.
Manager Doug Van Busker said they plan to bypass the ruptured bleaching tank, one of the five at the mill, which should take one or two weeks to complete. "There's no plans to lay anyone off. We'll get it going as quick as we can," Van Busker said Friday.
That should be nothing but good news for the 225 workers at the mill, which just returned to production last fall after being closed for more than two years.
Union representative Carl Bernasky said he'd received the same information: the company is going to bypass the ruptured bleaching tank.
"The guys will help as best at they can to make that happen," said Bernasky, president of the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers union, local 1092.
He acknowledged there were some workers who were nervous over the implications of the rupture.
The mill's return to production last fall was also estimated to support another 500 spinoff jobs in logging, trucking and companies that supply and service the mill in the community of 4,000.
No one was hurt in the incident, which Van Busker characterized as "awesome."
The 29-metre bleaching tank ripped from the 12-metre mark nearly to the floor, spilling about 50 tonnes of brown-stock pulp onto the floor of the mill. After wood chips are turned into pulp, the pulp is bleached to turn it white.
All of the brown pulp was contained in the building, so it didn't constitute an environmental concern, although the B.C. Ministry of Environment was informed, said Van Busker.
Earlier, on Wednesday morning, the plant had been shut down because of a tube leak on its recovery boiler. The plant shut down -- which meant the chemicals were isolated and not flowing through the mill's system -- which was fortunate.
Had the mill been operating, there would have been a release of chemicals, noted Van Busker.
WorkSafe B.C. has already been onsite -- including engineers from Vancouver -- to determine the cause of the incident.
Van Busker said the company will also be doing their own investigation into the cause of the rupture.
While the first bleaching tank will need to be replaced, Van Busker said he did not know how long that would take.
He also couldn't provide immediately an estimate of the cost of the damages and lost production.
The pulp mill's return to production had been a sign of better times for Mackenzie, 192 kilometres north of Prince George, which had been hit hard by an extended forestry downturn.
The mill returned to production after Paper Excellence, a subsidiary owned by Indonesian-based Sinarmas, purchased the mill for $20 million from a private Edmonton-based company.
That company had purchased the mill from bankrupt Pope and Talbot, but had been unable to return it to production.
Although shut down, the mill had been kept warm through two winters in order to keep equipment from freezing.
