Loggers thwarted by thaw

Winter weather generally is not the type of thing people enjoy.

It’s cold and icy and frequently forces motorists to scrape their windshields clean or to plow snow out of their driveways. Contending with “the white stuff” can be messy, time-consuming and hazardous.

So what’s wrong with several days of 50-degree weather and rain in January? Plenty, if you try to make your living harvesting trees in the Maine woods.

“It’s getting critically serious,” Ron Lovaglio, director of wood resources for Sappi Fine Paper, said Thursday. “The woods are soft and people can’t operate. It’s too wet to go in there.”

Each year the months of January, February and March typically are the busiest for loggers, who take advantage of the frozen ground to harvest trees that are then shipped to pulp and paper mills and to biomass plants, according to Lovaglio, former commissioner of the Maine Department of Conservation. Not only do subfreezing temperatures make it easier to get equipment into the woods, he said, but they minimize the amount of environmentally damaging mud and runoff that is created during harvesting.

“The impact is that production is off 35 percent,” he said of the mild weather. “There are families behind those loggers. They are basically out of work.”

Stephen Hanington, a logger who operates his company out of Macwahoc Plantation, said rainy weather last fall put a dent in Maine’s logging industry for all of October and half of November. He was able to stay busy through December, he said, but now the rainy weather is holding up his ability to transport his harvested wood. Either roads are too soft for trucks to drive on or the repeated combination of snow and then rain has made them too icy.

“They’re thawing out now,” he said. “We’ve been down about 25 to 30 percent on our trucking.”

Tony Madden, whose logging company operates out of Milford, said Thursday he has had to move his logging operations twice this winter to find harder, more stable ground on which to operate his equipment. So far he’s been able to avoid laying anybody off, but, like Hanington, he estimated he is about 25 percent to 30 percent behind his harvest production this year.

“The mills can’t be getting the wood they should be” getting, he said.

Joel Swanton, regional manager of the Forest Resources Association, said Thursday that soft ground is not the only concern. Wintertime rain and winds can cause flooding, especially when there is ice on the ground, or topple trees, blocking off access roads that otherwise might be suitable for use.

“Loggers and the folks who haul forest products are very sensitive to weather conditions,” Swanton said. “Production in the woods normally should be at their peak right now.”

Lovaglio said the weather this month was part of a “triple whammy” that has hit the logging industry recently. Not only was the weather also bad last fall, but it was bad for much of 2005.

“It was the rainiest year on record ever since they started keeping records in 1871,” he said.

The third part of the whammy is fuel costs. One truck driver who regularly delivers to Sappi’s Somerset Mill in Skowhegan told Lovaglio that on average his fuel costs for each delivery are about $48 more costly than they were a year ago.

“This problem, frankly, is all across the north,” Lovaglio said. “[Minnesota loggers] are seeing the same thing.”

It is not just loggers and mills that are affected, he said. Landowners big and small also are losing income because loggers don’t pay them for wood they cannot harvest.

And from the looks of it, the thaw is not over. Internet weather forecasting services on Thursday indicated that more rain is expected for Maine on Saturday.

According to Madden, there is no way in the forestry business for loggers and haulers to recover lost time.

“There’s no way to make it up,” he said. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”