Skeena Sawmills couldn’t take advantage of a plan by Northern Health for it to use the trees logged from the new Mills Memorial Hospital construction site because the species offered aren’t processed at the mil.
“Skeena [Sawmills] only uses hemlock, so this didn’t fit with our usage well,” said Skeena Sawmills president Roger Keery.
“That said, we did make an offer on the trees, but they decided on another use.”
And if Skeena Sawmills couldn’t use the wood, neither could its next door sister company, the Skeena Bio-Energy pellet plant.
Raw material for the pellet plant must be ground up and that would have meant bringing in a grinder, a cost-prohibitive measure for the small volume on offer, said Keery.
“Our plant is set up to use waste material from the sawmill, so using other material means getting it processed. This limits what we can take some, but as the plant continues improve, we will be looking for additional wood in the future,” he said.
The new Mills Memorial will be built on the same property as the current Mills and Northern Health had the area logged in anticipation of a final construction contract being signed between the provincial government and the preferred contractor, PCL Construction.