PORT ANGELES — The 50 sawmill and planer workers at the Interfor Pacific Sawmill in Port Angeles will be back to work Monday after the mill shut down its operations this last week.
Steve Kroll, mill manager, said market factors caused the temporary layoffs.
Due to a depressed housing market, many mills are facing occasional week-long shutdowns.
Kroll said that wasn’t the case a year ago.
“There’s just not enough demand” now, he said.
Kroll said this isn’t the first time mills have faced such shutdowns.
Typically these cycles happen yearly or even every five years, he said.
“This is a super, duper one,” he said.
“It will come back,” he added.
The mill is owned by International Forest Products Ltd., also known as Interfor.
The company finalized the purchase of two Portac Inc. mills on the West End — a planer mill in Forks and a sawmill in Beaver — on Tuesday for $28.25 million.
Rick Slaco, Interfor vice president, said there aren’t any layoffs planned for those two mills, but that situation can change.
“All of our mills right now are looking very hard at what order files are,” he said.
“It’s on a week-to-week basis.”
The mills together employ 55 people.
Slaco said a benefit to those employees is that Interfor is a financially strong company, despite the market downturn.
Operating the three mills on the North Olympic Peninsula allows Interfor to be more flexible with the type of lumber it produces, he said.
“When we make a purchase like this, we are not thinking about today, we are thinking about the long-term,” Slaco said.
Interfor is located in Vancouver, British Columbia.
It operates two mills in Oregon, the mills at Forks, Beaver and Port Angeles and five mills in British Columbia.
Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.
