Coping with change - building a new timber industry.

• Author: Swagel, Will
• Position: Ketchikan, AK

Ketchikan Pulp Corp. closed its mill forever in March. Now Ketchikan must look toward new ways of using wood fiber, its most abundant natural resource. Sitka and Wrangell may be able to offer some pointers.

Ausda Forest Service economist on loan to the Alaska Department of Commerce and Economic Development and a member of Gov. Knowles' timber task force, Kathleen Morse has grown used to hearing people talk about changing the Alaska forest products industry to cope with the new political reality, which is, "Just say 'No' to logging in the National Forest."

Forest Service harvests have continued to decline year after year and with this decline have gone hundreds of high-paying jobs in southeastern Alaska. In March Ketchikan lost 500 mill jobs the town had held for more than 30 years. Sitka lost its pulp mill in 1993. But chief among the casualties was Wrangell (pop. 2,400), where the Alaska Pulp Corp. closed its sawmill in 1994-and laid off 25 percent of the town's workforce.

When Greg Rathke, a long-time Wrangell resident, told Morse last year that he was thinking of investing in a kiln to dry lumber, she had to take his words - like so many other good ideas she heard on her travels - as something that would just have to wait until the wood supply stabilized. Though Wrangell's not having a kiln was a shame, she thought, since such a facility is a vital step toward being able to manufacture finished products out of local trees.

So Morse was shocked to see that Rathke, a heating and plumbing contractor for the last 10 years, had gone and actually built himself a 34-foot-long kiln out of remodeled fish processing tanks and rails. The rig is capable of drying about 40,000 board feet per month, depending on the tree species.

"Ever since I've lived in Southeast, I haven't been able to use the wood that's all around me," says Rathke, who'd spent the previous decade as woodworker and builder. "So now I will be able to."

Rathke hopes to produce home and business furnishings from local woods and also to provide kiln services to other businesses. With the demise of Southeast's pulp mills and the Forest Service's shift away from generous harvests, businesses like Rathke's are the only hope for an industry that has seen few bright spots during the 1990s.

"I'm finding seedlings hidden away in these little areas of Southeast," says Morse, who is charged with doing what she can with what she's got, but nonetheless admits frustration about trying to plan for a wood products industry without a consistent wood supply. "I'm trying to nurture these little seedlings and grow them into strong and stable businesses."

Weaving a Woodbasket

One thing Morse and other timber planners agree on is that the demise of the Sitka and Ketchikan pulp mills has ended the era of a big Forest Service bureaucracy serving just a few mega-clients. The only chance of a continued wood industry, they say, lies in weaving together various timber sources-making a woodbasket - and in linking together businesses that allow a more efficient use of timber.

This trend exists throughout the industry - more and...