The Babine Forest Products mills site is alive with the sounds of machinery - eerie for a mill that is clearly, utterly dead.
Through the gaping holes of what once were steel walls that were torn like paper in the explosion and fire five months ago today, it's easy to piece together where the workers once stood at their stations, cutting trees into lumber.
One question comes to mind walking through the site -- "how did anyone walk out of here alive?"
Two did not.
Robert Luggi Jr. and Carl Charlie died on the night of Jan. 20.
Two dozen others managed to escape the wreckage that night.
The destruction continues but in slow motion.
Four recycling trucks a day roll off the Babine site, each loaded with 58,000 pounds of steel and other metal. It is being picked and plucked out of the splintered superstructure by a Caterpillar 330 heavy processor. It's the kind of machine that could have a bucket on the boom or a log claw for progressive jobs, but this one has a shear head for cutting apart steel beams, like a massive Jaws-Of-Life.
It has a 60-tonne bite and it's using all of it to rip apart what remains of the mill.
Out in the log yard, which was almost loaded to capacity when Babine exploded that night, the task of selling off the unmilled timber has begun. That, too, requires a lot of heavy equipment.
"Rather than leave it to rot we are sending it to other mills, but at their price," said Peter Marshall, maintenance superintendent at the Babine site.
A lot of it was oversized lengths brought in through Babine's back door into the woods, which allows for much longer and wider logging truck loads than the highway trips the wood must now take to its new destinations. There were lengths of more than 100 feet on Babine's landing but they all have to be bucked off at 60 feet to go to the purchasing mills. The remaining odd ends are hard to sell.
"We've had 11 pieces of equipment out here for the last month, handling it every which way except milling it," Marshall said.
The mill had 13.9 million board feet of lumber already milled when the blast occurred, allowing them about six weeks of planer mill time. There are two weeks of that remaining to process the lumber for sale to their regular clients - 30 per cent to Western Canadian customers, about 40 per cent to the United States, and the remainder to China and other miscellaneous destinations.
Another major client of Babine's is the Pinnacle Pellet plant just down the lake, connected by the CN Rail lines. Babine would send Pinnacle all their sawdust and other woody debris to make into pellets.
"We're going after a bunch of dead wood in the bush for them, because even though we aren't running, we still have a contract with them we have to fulfill," Marshall said.
Everyone employed at the Babine site smiles sparingly, does their work with quiet resignation, and talks with a determined edge about rebuilding as soon as possible.
Everyone - both the Babine employees and Burns Lake residents - still wants to know what it was that caused the blast but he WorkSafeBC investigation is still far from over.
-- The Citizen will have more on how Burns Lake residents are coping in the aftermath of the Babine Forest Products sawmill explosion and fire in the coming days.
