Devastating !
That’s how 100 Mile House Mayor Maureen Pinkney describes West Fraser’s announcement that it will permanently close the sawmill in the community.
Pinkney was asked if the announcement came as a surprise.
“It’s always a surprise when it’s permanent, so the announcement of a permanent closure was a bit of a surprise. We knew with the tariffs and the distance of hauling logs and all of the other related issues with forestry in BC over the last couple of years that we’ve had some soft closures, temporary shutdowns, but to hear that we will lose yet another one of our sawmills, and this is the last one of the three big sawmills that we had here, is very devastating to a small town.”
The other closures were to the Chasm sawmill and the Oriented Strand Board Plant.
Pinkney says the West Fraser closure is sad for the workers, and for the community.
“It takes the young families away from small communities and this is the place that people should be raising their families, so now again we have a bunch of workers that are probably going to be faced with moving their families to somewhere else if they want to stay in the forest business. That effects every store and every person, we’re a very small tight community, and we’re all going to feel it.”
Pinkney says she is confident that the community can get through this, although she says it will come at a cost.
“All of a sudden the stuff that you want to do you can’t because every dollar that you have, obviously has to go to fixing infrastructure and stuff that can’t be left. We’re at the situation where our community is 60 years old which means all the infrastructure, if it hasn’t been replaced already, is due and that costs way more than it every used to.”
Pinkney says they will definitely be looking to the senior governments to help weather the storm.
“We don’t need to have a whole bunch of meetings and sit down and chat about this, we’ve been through it before. We’ve put together a very good resource for the employees a guide to help them for their next steps, but for our community we’re going to be looking at funding, things to help us weather the storm of the lost revenue.”
Pinkney adds that she is still hopeful that the forest industry will eventually come back into the community.
