PORT ANGELES — Port Angeles Harbor has fallen a bit quieter with the shutdown of a mammoth machine that stripped bark off hemlock logs before they were shipped to Asia.
Munro LLC’s lease on Port of Port Angeles-owned land that the huge, noisy contraption occupies on the east edge of the former KPly mill site expired at the end of October.
The machine that peels hemlock logs remains at the site but will be removed in “a couple of months,” said Tanya Kerr, the port’s property manager.
Meanwhile, the Port of Port Angeles is enjoying an uptick in unloading logs at its own Marine Drive yard off barges from Canada.
Some of those logs are pushed from 300-log barges into the water, then plucked from the harbor. Others are unloaded directly onto the shore from barges that can carry 50 logs.
The Canadian timber is helping prop up a sag in log yard activity in 2015 caused by softening timber demand in Asia.
’Global commodity’
“It’s truly a global commodity,” said the port’s terminal manager, Mike Nimmo.
“People are taking advantage of that and the exchange rate, too.”
The U.S. dollar is rising in value against the Canadian dollar and Asian currencies.
Also in the meantime, the port plans to market the 19-acre KPly site — including the tract leased to Munro — as a Marine Trades Industrial Park as early as January.
Munro LLC’s ring debarker was acquired from the owners of the Peninsula Plywood mill — which succeeded KPly when it went out of business — before they in turn went bankrupt in 2012.
Passers-by could watch the logs being hoisted from log trucks, fed through the debarker, stacked like huge toothpicks and eventually transported to Terminal 3. There, they were loaded onto ships carrying up to 10 million board feet of hemlock for China and Korea.
Logs headed to Asia must be stripped to minimize the export of insect pests to other countries. Other debarkers operate at the port’s log yard and at the airport.
Munro operation
The Munro operation handled domestically grown hemlock from private lands that legally can be exported. The port’s own log yard farther westward on the harbor handles logs harvested from Department of Natural Resources land and Olympic National Forest that must be processed in the U.S.
Lubricating and hydraulic fluids have been drained from the Munro debarker, said Chris Hartman, port director of engineering.
The rest of the KPly site has been cleaned of thousands of tons of soil contaminated by petrochemicals and other toxic chemicals.
Backfilling and grading the excavations are awaiting drier weather, Hartman said.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
