Alaska’s Last Pulp Mill Shuts Down

The faintly bitter smell of damp wood pulp hung in the air for the last time Monday as Alaska’s last pulp mill shut down, sending the timber town that has depended on it for four decades into an uncertain future.

“A lot of people maybe will have to go work for McDonald’s to make a living, and that ain’t right,” said Rob Izatt, among 500 workers who will be out of a job at the Ketchikan Pulp Co.

A money-loser for years, the aging mill was shut down by corporate parent Louisiana Pacific Corp. partly because it needed $200 million in environmental renovations.

Severance pay amounted to a year’s wages or more for some longtime employees, many of whom plan to take the summer off to fish, hunt and think about a new career.

For just about everyone else in this Alaska Panhandle island town of 15,000, the impact is already being felt. Car and boat sales have plummeted. The housing market has been flooded and other businesses have cut back on staff and employees hours. A local shipping company is hauling in about 20 percent less freight and shipping out more household belongings.

“I don’t think there’s one person on this island who won’t be affected by the pulp mill’s closure,” said Teresa Garland, who heads the chamber of commerce.

The sort of high-paying jobs the mill offered will be hard to find in a place where low-wage tourism jobs and seasonal seafood work account for much of the employment.

“That’s what the pulp mill has always been in this town, a place to work,” said Paul Lamm, a longtime mill worker. “Once you work there, as long as you didn’t do anything stupid, you knew you could always go back and get a job.”

The mill has run around the clock almost every day since 1954, except for brief maintenance shutdowns and a couple of labor disputes.

As Alaska’s last working pulp mill, it survived in an industry where production has gradually shifted overseas. Alaska Pulp Corp. shut down its pulp mill in nearby Sitka four years ago.

Both pulp companies had been nearing the end of 50-year contracts with the U.S. Forest Service to cut timber in the Tongass National Forest, deals the federal government struck in the 1950s to spur job development in southeast Alaska.

The last monster rolls of thick paper pulp are expected to come off the mill’s production lines early today. Workers will stay on the job anywhere from a week to a month doing mop-up chores, but everyone will be gone by the end of April.

Ketchikan Pulp’s managers said the shutdown was partly due to environmental lawsuits that tied up logging and a change in Clinton administration forest policies that made Tongass timber more scarce and costly.