Plum Creek mill restarts after a two-month shutdown

Logs were rolling and saws were spinning at Plum Creek's Columbia Falls Lumber for the first time in more than two months on Monday.

"Just like when you go on vacation, it's nice to come home," Nels Sletvold said as he took a break from grading lumber around noon Monday.

He has 30 years in at Plum Creek, the last 25 or 26 years as a lumber grader. It's one of the more skilled jobs in the mill, where an eye for detail is key to spotting knots, watching for warped boards, tagging the rougher ones that are fine for moulding but not much else.

In his three decades at the mill, this was Sletvold's third layoff - and by far the longest.

"We had a couple weeks off in 2003 with all the fires," he said, "and another couple weeks just a year or so after I started here."

So this time he did some work around the house and a little job hunting. He checked in at the Thompson Falls mill but they weren't hiring.

"It's a pretty rough time, but it happens," he said. "There's no guarantees."

The sawmill's restart was a glimmer of good news in a severely ailing Northwest Montana timber industry. Slightly stronger prices on 12-inch pine boards brought last week's announcement that Plum Creek would fire up production at the mill that had stood idle since the company announced its temporary closure Jan. 8.

Stronger demand in remodel and repair markets, officials figure, is the probable cause for the uptick in prices.

"Maybe there's just more optimism out there," plant manager Greg Grace said Monday morning. "Also, a lot of places have just run down their supply."

He said a crew of about 10 people took four days to get the plant ready for a restart, calibrating the electronics, greasing moving parts on machines, checking alignments, getting saw blades ready to go, digging logs out from under their winter load of snow and ice.

All but two of the mill's original crew - 130 people, including seven salaried workers - returned to their jobs with the restart.

They will crank out appearance-grade, as opposed to structural-grade, boards at the same rate as before.

The mill is designed to produce 66 million board feet a year; this year's production, even with the 65-day shutdown, is projected at 50 million board feet. Grace said 250 units, each one a metal-strapped and paper-wrapped bundle of 1,000 board feet, will ship daily to the Midwest, to wholesalers, big box stores, remanufacturing factories that make windows and doors, and California. From there the wood likely will be sold into Mexico, made into inexpensive furniture and shipped back into the United States.

With a four-month supply already in the log yard, the mill's 65 logging contractors who work the woods on Plum Creek land are likely to see down time from this year's spring break-up extended later into June.

"There are short-term and long-term issues in the market," Plum Creek's Director of Community Affairs Jim Lehner said.

"We're looking at it week to week, on production for MDF (medium density fiberboard) and plywood. "We'll probably have periodic downturns in plywood."

For now, though, Jeff Johnson is just glad to be back to work.

"It's kind of fun," he said from a glassed-in booth above the head rig, the biggest band saw in the mill. It slices slabs of wood off the raw debarked logs. Johnson is working the remote controls with both hands, setting widths, feeding logs into the saw, rolling them for the next series of cuts.

"There's more challenge to it … This is a big, aggressive saw so you can feed it faster," he said. Even though it's not his normal job - he's the crew's reserve sawyer - his interest in the head rig makes him somebody that managers want on that saw.

He worked at Plum Creek as a high-schooler in the early 1980s, then came back in fall 1991.

When the layoff notice came in January, he said he and his family weren't 'super prepared but we made do … being laid off was completely out of my control."

He never missed a single one of his son's Wildcat basketball games all the way through the state tournament, spent time with his 10-year-old daughter and wife, and did fix-up work around the house. His wife was able to put in more hours as a temporary worker with the school district, helping fill in some gaps.

"I was anxious to get back at it," he said. "But with the economy I'm still a bit apprehensive about how long we're going to stay (working.)"

The workers' health benefits continued through the layoffs, and all were eligible for unemployment benefits after a week's waiting period. Even so, many had to cut back in certain areas.

Misty Anderson wasn't one of them. She was back on the job Monday morning, rotating among three jobs.

As the grade edger operator, she shot laser beams across rough-cut slabs of wood, eyeballed how much clear wood she could get out of each unedged board, aligned the optimal cuts and, with a click of a button, sent her decision to a computerized saw for cutting - all in about five seconds a board.

As the gang operator, she operated controls from a glassed-in booth, watching to be sure logs came straight into the gang saw and followed them down the line to the grade edger. She's been four years on the gang, seven years at Plum Creek overall.

"I kind of knew something was going to happen," in the time leading up to the January layoffs, Anderson said, 'so I got prepared. I always have (funds for) three months worth of bills in the bank."

So during her time off she hung out with her children and her husband, Robb Hansen, who also works at Plum Creek, remodeled the bathroom and made four art-tile-topped tables from start to finish.

"I had to come back to work to get lumber," she said with a chuckle. Employees can buy lumber at a discount. When she got the recall notice, "I was excited ….. and I was tired of my break."