The new Lakeland Mill is designed to be an industry leader in environmental and safety features. Mill officials and dignitaries all lamented the tragic reason for rebuilding the 50-year-old operation, but in the spirit of honouring those who were killed, injured or affected by the 2012 explosion and fire, pledged to make the new facility the best of its kind.
Even before reconstruction got underway on Monday, environmental stewardship was in effect.
"Ninety per cent or more of the materials [on the site after the blast] were recycled or reclaimed for use in the new facility," said the mill's maintenance superintendent Garth Turner. "All the metals were separated and grouped, either for scrap metal sale or salvage. The old concrete was crushed for use as new aggregate. All the rebar - the reinforcement steel - was broken free from the concrete for recycling. Almost everything was put to use in some way."
Principal ownership company Sinclar Group Forest Products Ltd. said the new Lakeland sawmill would be open in late summer 2014 and employ about 100 people working on two shifts.
This is fewer people than the previous Lakeland facility, but not because it will be milling less wood. Sinclar has tenure for more than 750,000 cubic metres of standing timber, allowing them a secure fibre supply. With it, the new mill will process about 200 million board feet of lumber per year.
Sinclar's president and CEO Greg Stewart said that all this lumber, laid end to end, would circle the planet one and a half times. It is the equivalent lumber required to build 12,500 average homes.
"Our operation is a huge contributor to the local and national economy," said Stewart.
The new mill will, like the previous facility, specialize in stud lumber (the stuff used in common home construction) and be capable of cutting in either metric dimensions or American Lumber Standard dimensions.
"We wish this tragedy had never happened, but we are committed to learning from the experience," said Stewart. "This new sawmill will be a specialized, future-looking mill that will meet the needs of our employees from the perspective of health, safety and a welcoming working environment."
Chief among the innovations, said the Lakeland officials, is a dust removal system. Since fine wood dust has been identified by WorkSafeBC as an explosion threat, and is possibly a factor in the Lakeland blast, this was a priority item in the rebuilding plans.
"We are looking at point-of-source dust removal, which is a new term in the B.C. industry," said Turner. "Methane mitigation will also be a big part of what we do to ensure site safety."
The Lakeland facility is located on a former landfill. It is known to produce amounts of methane that seeps to the surface. It is also a possible factor in the explosion and fire.
Energy efficiency, production innovations, even worker ergonomics are part of the design features for the new mill. "State of the art stuff," said Turner. "It will put us in a leadership position on the safety side, the environmental side and the production side of our industry."
The fire did not destroy the adjacent planer mill or district energy system. The new facility will plug seamlessly into those other operations on the mill's campus.
"Lakeland has been here for 50 years, and I look forward to the day a little over a year from now when we can celebrate the start of the next half century," said Stewart.
