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Mill owner testifies at coroner's inquest
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
  Creativity camp
  Makenna Nelless, 10, makes a cast of nine-year-old Isabella Deol's hand on Wednesday during a creativity camp at Two Rivers Gallery.
 IPG board a party of one
 Charelle EVELYN Citizen staff cevelyn@pgcitizen.ca
   The group of seven people responsible for overseeing Initiatives Prince George has resigned.
   IPG’s board of directors - consisting of Steve Nycholat, Greg Stewart, Bob Redden, Doug Bell, Alice Downing, Sonya Hunt, Charles Jago and Citizen publisher Colleen Sparrow - tendered their resignations last week.
   On June 12, the city announced its decision not to renew the contract with IPG, the arm’s-length economic development arm, once it expires at the end of the year.
   Members of the board and IpG CEO Heather Oland said the news came as a surprise and the board released a statement expressing their regret over the city’s decision.
   The volunteer board of directors was in place to oversee Initiatives Prince George.
   Former board chair Nycholat said the group has performed their duties by giving notice to the staff and wrapping up affairs as much as they could.
   “The organization is formally wrapping up at the end of December. We’re not in a position to create new plans or start new initiatives because we don’t know what that is,” Nycholat said, adding the group didn’t feel it was in a position to carry on. “So it was a logical point in time, by our assessment, this was a good time to for us to step back from the organization.”
   According to IPG’s articles of incorporation, the city, as the organization’s sole shareholder, can “elect or appoint directors to fill any vacancies on the board of directors” if there are no directors.
   If the company has no directors or fewer directors in office than the number set pursuant to these articles as the quorum of directors, the shareholders may elect or appoint directors to fill any vacancies on the
 board of directors.
   On Monday, city council will vote to approve city manager Kathleen Soltis as the corporation’s sole director.
   “Appointing Ms. Soltis to the IPG board is a logical step to facilitate and ease the transfer of economic development services to a city department,” said a report from administrative services general manager Walter Babicz.
   “The staff at IPG has just been phenomenal under the leadership of (IpG CEO) Heather Oland and it’s been a great pleasure working with the current and past board members,” Nycholat said. “It’s been a great opportunity to learn and collaborate with some really high-calibre people in the community. It’s been a great experience.”
   The city has had some sort of external economic development branch for the past three decades.
   Reasons for the change given by Mayor Lyn Hall included saving up to $500,000 and giving city council and staff more of a direct connection to the economic development process.
   On June 15, city council approved the formation of a new committee to advise on the staffing and resource levels required to meet the city’s economic development goals as well as finalize the transition plan to switching the operations from IPG to the city’s planning department.
   The committee is mandated to make its final report to council by Sept. 30, but hasn’t yet met.
   Members of the IPG board were invited to sit on the committee plotting the future of economic development activity as an internal city hall operation, but that committee’s membership has yet to be finalized.
   Nycholat said it’s up to individual board members to make that decision as to whether they will join the committee. For his part, Nycholat said he was still unsure as to his own participation, given his schedule.
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
   BURNS LAKE — Hampton Affiliates CEO Steve Zika told a coroner’s inquest Wednesday he was concerned about the level of dust at the Burns Lake sawmill the company owned but did not think it would have fueled an explosion.
   Robert Luggi, 45, and Carl Charlie,
 42, died in the Jan. 20, 2012 blast that destroyed Babine Forest Products and left 19 other employees with serious injuries, many of them suffering severe burns.
   A WorkSafeBC investigation concluded the dry, powdery sawdust from beetle-killed pine, provided the fuel for the blast.
   Under questioning from coroner’s counsel John Orr, Zika said he would visit Babine on a quarterly basis and came away concerned about the haze the dust left in the mill’s air.
   Zika said he felt employees should not have to work in those conditions but added steps were being taken to deal with the problem.
   Those included hiring more people to do clean up and bringing in a vacuum truck. Babine management was also in the process of purchasing a larger baghouse to increase the mill’s capacity for handling the extra wood dust, the inquest heard.
   And while he was aware wood dust could fuel explosions in other types of operations, notably pellet plants, Zika said he had never heard of a “catastrophic dust explosion in a sawmill” prior to the blast at Babine and one that occurred at Lakeland Mills in Prince George three months later.
   The Oregon-based sawmill operator bought Babine in 2006 from West Fraser, which had been ordered to sell the facility after the government concluded anti-trust regulations had been violated.
   Zika said the exceptionally low stump-age fee the province was charging for beetle-killed pine made processing that type of wood a “positive” over the short term but a risk over the longer run because eventually the supply of that type of timber would run out.
   To reduce costs even further and take advantage of the low stumpage while there was still beetle-killed pine available, Zika said the amount of time the mill was processing lumber was increased from 80 to 100 hours per week.
   Although it was run for longer durations, Zika said that on an hourly basis, not as much lumber was pushed through by Hampton as had been under West Fraser. But he also said it was becoming more difficult to process beetle-killed pine because as time went on, the dead trees got drier.
   “A log that goes through that’s two years dead is different than a log that goes through that’s three years dead,” Zika
                                                                                                 ZIKA
 said. Not only would the timber break up more easily , it would produce more dust, which the mill’s dust collection system had a tougher time dealing with, Zika said.
   “I was aware that the dust situation wasn’t getting better,” Zika said.
   Zika said Hampton’s intention was not there to simply take advantage of the low stumpage and then leave once the pine had run out.
   He said the company was interested in purchasing the mill because Hampton wanted to secure a supply of SPF (spruce-pine-fir) for its wholesale divison. Hampton’s mills in the U.S. Pacific Northwest produced primary Douglas Fir and hemlock, he said.
   “But we definitely understood there was a risk that after about 10 years we would start to get tight and it was going to definitely be a challenge in terms of keeping the mills in work,” Zika said.
   By the time Hampton had bought the mill, Babine was 30 years old and no longer considered the world-class sawmill it had been when first built. And because West Fraser had put the facility on the sales block, Zika said it was not putting as much money into upkeep.
   Hampton spent millions upgrading and repairing the old mill before it was destroyed. Building the new mill cost more than the company has received from the insurance company, the inquest heard.
   “It was a terrible financial investment,” Zika said.
   The new Babine sawmill is capable of producing 200 million board feet of lumber per year, compared to 320 million at its predecessor. Hampton continues to hold an 89-per-cent stake in the operation while the Burns Lake Native Development Corporation, owned by six bands in the area, owns the remaining 11 per cent.
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