Numerous trucking and logging businesses are linked to Georgia-Pacific Corp., and those in the wood business are saying they’ll likely feel the impact of the Old Town mill’s closure at some point – if they aren’t feeling it already.

“It’s going to affect the wood industry – everybody,” Eunice Preble of Bowerbank said Friday. “Everyone will be affected that has anything to do with the wood.”

The effects of Thursday’s closure of the G-P mill in Old Town and associated chip mills in Costigan, Milo, Portage and Houlton will create a ripple effect throughout the region, Preble noted.

Preble is a log yard employee at the E D Bessey & Son wood yard in Brownville. Her husband, Rodney Preble, has managed the yard for the past eight years. The family operates the yard together; the Prebles’ son, Danny Preble, and the couple’s brother-in-law also work at the yard.

E D Bessey & Son operates log yards in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Eunice Preble said that Bessey, as a broker, doesn’t buy the hardwood pulp at the Brownville lot, but that any of the contractors with whom they work could take the wood to G-P, and the Prebles would pay out of the Bessey yard.

“It goes directly to the mill,” Preble said, “which has been probably a good thing for us because now we’re not sitting on [it].”

The yard doesn’t supply a huge amount of wood to G-P, Preble said. She estimated that they send 4,000 tons to the Old Town facility in six months to a year.

“I think some of the smaller contractors, as opposed to some of the large contractors, will be affected more,” Eunice Preble said.

The closure of the Milo chip mill affects not only the log yard, it has a direct impact on the Preble family.

“We know the guys that work there,” Eunice Preble said. “In a sense, everybody is involved and affected somehow.”

Loggers will have to find a market for the wood they cut, truck drivers won’t have wood to haul, and the impact eventually will reach other businesses and stores as people’s spending habits change, she said.

“It just has an escalating impact on everybody,” Preble said.

Ed Haverlock of Greenbush owns and operates Ed Haverlock & Sons Trucking. He said Friday that although he’s not feeling the pinch right now, eventually the impact will make its way to him.

“We haul wood into the satellite mills,” Haverlock said, noting his company used to take loads to Milo and Costigan.

“If somebody else doesn’t buy the mill, eventually we will begin to have problems to sell the hardwood,” he said. “I can’t say how soon.”

Uncertainty in the market as a whole makes it difficult to stay optimistic at times.

“This time of year we switch over and haul for the big yards, like Jay, but they’re talking about selling out too,” Haverlock said.

Tim Markie, a logger for Gardner Trucking of Lincoln since 1981, said he’s not worried about finding other work, but has seen the impact on the trucking operation.

“I work for a big company. We’ve got other mills to provide for,” he said Friday.

Tom Gardner, vice president of Gardner Cos., the parent company of Gardner Trucking, said that about 20 percent of his company’s business went to G-P.

“It’s definitely no shocker,” Markie said of the mill closure. “Everybody’s been waiting to see how long it was going to last before it shut down. Even the governor had an idea.”

Markie of Mattawamkeag said the fact that the mill has been updated in recent years likely will help it sell.

“That’s a pretty modernized mill that’s in great shape,” he said.