on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Without the Mill

Pulp workers adjust to a world that might not need their work

(Nov. 6, 2008)  On Oct. 28, a dense fog poured into the towns around Humboldt Bay, stuffing the spaces between buildings with a white, impenetrable ground-to-sky murk. You couldn’t see 10 feet in front of you, and if you happened to be out on the Samoa Peninsula and stopped your car just across from where the Evergreen pulp mill ought to be, you could imagine it wasn’t there. Just whiteness. It was as if the once-dependable white steam plumes — Eureka’s weathervane — that had waved from the mill up until the week before, when the mill shut down, had returned with a ghostly, spreading vengeance to haunt us all.

Actually, things around the mill had been pretty murky for weeks. Months. Ever since the stock market took its first big nosedive and the stock of the company that owned Evergreen, Lee & Man Paper Manufacturing Ltd., went with it. Credit had frozen, people weren’t buying stuff, demand for containerboard — one of Lee & Man’s main products — plummeted, and there went the price of pulp. Energy, freight and chemical costs, meanwhile, had skyrocketed over the past year and a half, said Rex Bohn, who was Evergreen’s vice president of resource management until his job ended two weeks ago.

Evergreen Pulp Mill. Photo by Heidi Walters.

GALLERY >

Some vendors filed mechanic’s liens against Evergreen for bills unpaid. Wood chip deliveries slowed, then stopped — from 125 truckloads a day to zero.

In early October, the company announced the mill would shut for a couple of days. Then they said it would be a little longer, and 15 percent of the workforce would be permanently laid off. The story kept changing, said several workers interviewed last week, management grew quiet, and the place became a rumor mill.

Finally the company announced that the mill would close — for three to six months, maybe, whenever the market recovered — and everybody would be laid off.

Then news broke that Lee & Man had actually sold Evergreen to an outfit incorporated in the Virgin Islands called Worthy Pick. Evergreen CEO David Tsang (who didn’t return the Journal‘s emails or calls last week) later told the Times-Standard that it was just a restructuring, a way to refinance the mill so it wouldn’t go bankrupt.

The mill stopped production Oct. 15. By the end of last week, only about 20 employees remained to keep the place “warm” — some to guard the place, others to keep the effluent line out to the ocean flushed clear of silt.

And the rest? What will they do?

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