Members of the media toured Lakeland Mills this morning while it prepares to reopen next week. The fully redesigned and state of the art mill is built around capturing and preventing dust build up.
Plant manager Mark Witte says the whole team is anxious to get back to work back making lumber. He says they will be starting slowly next week;
“We are going to bring two shifts of operators onto a single shift. So we will have double the operators, that’s thinking of safety and more eyes on the task so that everyone learns together before we separate off into two shifts.”
He added that the plant will be one of the safest;
“It’s probably the only mill to have all of these design features incorporated. The Burns Lake plant has many of the same features because it is newly built. While older mills are retrofitting some of these ideas in, a lot of these ideas are well known, but it’s just not easy to implement them into an older mill”
He noted that the mill has about 50% of the previous workers returning to the plant that will have a slightly higher capacity once fully up and running.
In addition to extensive dust catching equipment and the over arching design features that prevent dust build up by eliminating flat surfaces, the plant has a new methane gas venting system. After the explosion in 2012, soil tests found that the whole site contained elevated levels of the gas. Although not at explosive levels, bore holes and a venting system was implemented during the rebuild to suck the gas out of the ground with a vacuum system.
More photos below.
