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New mill could handle small-tree glut Fiber can work as plywood alternative, foresters hear By BETH QUINN CENTRAL POINT -- Public and private foresters searching for a way to pay for thinning Southern Oregon's dense, fire-endangered forests heard a stunning suggestion from Boise Cascade on Friday: build a $130 million mill to produce oriented strand board. Not that Boise timberland manager Russ McKinley offered to do the job. "This is not a pitch for Boise Cascade to build a mill," he said. "But we have a huge quantity of fiber we've got to figure out something to do with." Local forest managers are just beginning to grasp the scale of the problem. Up to 45 percent of the region's public and private forests are choked with dense second-growth trees less than 10 inches in diameter. Small logs don't provide much return in a veneer plant or sawmill, McKinley told the Siskiyou Chapter of the Society of American Foresters, which met all day Friday at the Oregon State University Extension Auditorium to study the problem. Chipping such logs for paper production is seldom profitable, while sending chips to power plants will become a money-loser when utilities deregulate. The long-term solution might be a new manufacturing plant to make oriented strand board, the chip-board pioneered by Louisiana Pacific a decade ago that has found acceptance with consumers as a cheap alternative to plywood. The biggest hurdle to attracting the necessary $130 million investment is guaranteeing a timber supply. McKinley said such a mill would need to operate 24 hours a day, 12 months a year for 15 years to be profitable. That scale of operation would require 30,000 truckloads of logs a year, which in turn would require 3 million acres of forestland. Southern Oregon's industrial timberland owners, small woodlot owners and government agencies each control 1 million acres of second-growth forest. But a decade of timber wars has left doubts over government's ability to deliver a steady flow of timber. "The solution is here in this room," McKinley said. While foresters may argue about solutions to the region's dense and stagnant forests, there is little disagreement among forest scientists about the cause of the problem. A century of wildland fire suppression has changed the natural evolution of the forests, where such disturbances once cleared out small, young trees to benefit large, old trees. Forest Service regional ecologist Tom Atzet said that since 1941 the million-acre Siskiyou National Forest has had average annual burns of only 3,000 acres. Discount 1987's catastrophic fires and the average burn falls to 300 acres. "Change is an essential," Atzet said. "Ecosystems thrive on it." Just how essential was pointed out by Tom Sensenig, a forest ecologist with the Bureau of Land Management. His two-year study comparing historical growth patterns of old-growth forests with those of younger stands suggests that none of today's dense second growth will ever become old growth. "In the absence of fire, stands grow differently. They're on a different trajectory," he said. "In the absence of that natural disturbance, intervention is essential in many cases." For forest managers struggling with the lousy economics of small logs, McKinley's scenario offered hope. "I get real excited when I hear Russ McKinley talk about an OSB plant," said Steve Armitage, BLM forest manager for the Ashland resource area. But as local timber wars continue despite the new environmental rules in force since the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, few attending Friday's conference would hazard a guess when -- let alone if -- such a plant would ever be built. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA