Another Mill Closes,

More Lives Devastated

The long list of Montana sawmill closures has added another name. After 25 years of operation, Owens & Hurst Lumber Co., in Eureka, Montana, will close in May, owner Jim Hurst has announced. The mill is located in Lincoln County, which was once considered the ‘woodbasket’ of Montana. After the closure, the ‘woodbasket’ will contain just two small wood-processing facilities. Ninety employees, plus associated loggers, will be put out of work. Mill equipment will be auctioned off; similar auctions have returned about five cents for each dollar invested.

Like most sawmills, Owens & Hurst has been active in community affairs, offering financial help to local organizations and college students. The community will be much poorer for the loss of the business, the jobs it provided, and the community support that it offered. In addition, because of the outflux of those who can find no other employment in the rural area, remaining taxpayers will have to pay a bigger share of the local tax base.

The closure is especially heinous because there are thousands upon thousands of dead, dying, burned, and bug-infested trees in the nearby Kootenai and Flathead National Forests. The federal log supply, however, is small, unreliable, and of poor quality. The Kootenai, for example, supplied 200 million board feet per year in the 1980s; today the Forest Service offers about 55 million board feet per year -- of burned, dead, or diseased timber. Hurst imported burned logs from Canada for years to keep the mill running, but that source is dwindling.

Large mills with susbstantial sources of private timber, including their own forests, can afford to bid higher for the occasional federal timber sales offered than can small mills, which has made it hard for small mills surrounded by mostly federal timber to survive. And environists have appealed or sued to stop the sale of even dead or dying trees. With no hopes that the future timber supply will improve, Hurst made the painful decision to close the doors.

 

“(T)he anemic Forest Service timber sale program

is the overriding factor in our decision to close.”

Jim Hurst 

For almost twenty years, Hurst has been dealing with log shortages in an area choked with trees. In 1988, he organized the “Great Northwest Log Haul”, which delivered truckloads of wood from across the state and country to the Darby, Montana mill which was starving for wood. In 2001, a similar log haul saved the Owens & Hurst mill when it was facing an artificial shortage of timber. Hurst blames environmental obstructionists and the Forest Service for this and other mill closures. The agency, he said, responds to threats of lawsuits from environists instead of the needs of rural forests and communities. “Pure and simple, the anemic Forest Service timber sale program is the overriding factor in our decision to close.”

The Missoula-based Ecology Center and the Lands Council of Spokane stopped many National Forest timber sales -- including the salvage of burned trees -- in the area, and when the going got tough, Jim and community leaders met with the environists and personally appealed for a moratorium on the legal actions for the sake of the mill and the town. Environists, of course, refused to stop halting sales. And they insist that the closure is not their fault.

Such zealots still refuse to recognize that their actions put small businesses out of business and give advantages to big business by eliminating much of their competition. A Montana Wilderness Association spokesman blamed big mills for the closures. “Their competition has driven all the smaller guys out,” he told the Missoulian, adding that what is needed is more small-business set-asides. What is needed, Hurst responded, is more logs, plain and simple

The Ecology Center’s executive director told the Jim Mann from the Daily Interlake that curtailment of logging today is a direct result of overlogging decades ago. Timberlands must have a long rest, said the Center.

Hurst plans to stay in Eureka and keep working to help locals fight the obstructionists who are destroying the character of rural Montana and the lives of its inhabitants. The rural area has been so economically devastated over the last decade by federal and environist actions, however, that many of the sawmill employees and loggers will be forced to leave their homes in search of work.

(How many mills does it take, folks, before everyone stands up and says ‘Enough!’? How many ranchers, loggers, miners, and farmers must be bankrupted before we raise our voices loud enough to be heard? How many people must lose their homes and their property rights before we decide to take the time to stop it? If you don’t start doing something now, you could very well be the next to go. Aren’t you ready yet? -Ed.) 

Montana Sawmill Closures 

1990 Champion International, Missoula

F.H. Stoltze, Dillon 

1991 Flathead Lumber, Polson

WTD Forest Industries, Columbia Falls 

1993 Champion International, Libby 

1994 Crown Pacific, Superior

Darby Lumber, Darby

Tricon Lumber, Drummond 

1996 White Pine Sash, Missoula

Crown Pacific, Thompson Falls 

Louisiana Pacific, Libby 

1997 Idaho Pole, Bozeman 

Border Lumber, Rexford 

JD Lumber, Judith Gap 

Timberline Lumber, Kalispell 

1998 Stoltze Lumber, Darby 

2000 American Timber, Olney 

2002 Stimson Lumber Co., Libby 

2003 Trout Creek Lumber Co., Thompson Falls 

2005 Owens & Hurst Lumber Co., Eureka 

Black Hills Sawmill Closures

Powder River Sawmill, Osage, Wyoming 

Custer Lumber, Custer, South Dakota 

Hamm’s Sawmill, Rapid City, South Dakota 

Woods Sawmill, Spearfish, South Dakota 

Little River Lumber Co, Piedmont, South Dakota 

Pope & Talbot, Newcastle, Wyoming 

Log for Water

Rocky Mountain Regional Forester Rick Cables recently told a Wyoming legislative committee that substantial clearcutting could help to alleviate the ongoing drought. When lawmakers questioned whether the public would support such substantial forest thinning, Cables stated: “We have to educate people, ... to try and give the most accurate, honest information about the facts and the reality of the choices before the public. One choice is 25 percent of the forest being managed in an open condition.”

(Source: Associated Press)

(While clearcutting for water gain may sound extreme to some people, facts show that forests were historically much more open than they are today. We now have far too many trees absorbing too much water. In addition to creating more runoff, thinning trees has made it possible for springs to ‘spring back’ to life. -Ed.)