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Brink Forest Products plant reopens
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By Mark Nielsen, Prince george Citizen
After a six-week shutdown, Brink Forest Products is back up and operating.
The River Road lumber manufacturer reopened Monday, owner John Brink said, and is running at 60 to 70 per cent capacity while work continues on building ramps onto the plant properties from the raised River Road.
"We have a total of about six ramps that have to be put in, so hopefully that will be done fairly quickly," Brink said. "Obviously, because of the huge berm on River Road, we have to make all kinds of operational changes to our company and it's going to cost us a lot more to operate in adversity."
Following an extended Christmas shutdown after the property was hit hard by flooding, the operation was back up briefly in early January before it was shut down again, with Brink citing safety concerns surrounding the move to raise River Road above the 200-year floodplain.
Brink continues to keep an eye on the ice jam, which has grown to 13 kilometres by Friday morning. In late December, the jam had reached 10 km. before quickly contracting on New Year's Eve and again on Jan. 5, sending a torrent of water over the gabion dikes along River Road.
"The ice jam crisis, obviously, still continues and hopefully some of the remedies that are being used will pay off," he said. "It's a huge, huge problem."
Brink reiterated a call for a permanent diking system along the riverbank -- an industry group says it's willing to contribute $1 million toward the work -- but he also said dredging should be given a close look.
"If you look back to the 1960s, there were many more channels," he said. "We believe the river is choked at that location . . . the floods that took a huge amount of gravel and sand out of the Miworth area last spring is now all sitting on the bottom of the Nechako right where it joins the Fraser.
"Not only has it got narrower but it has also got shallower and we believe that lowering the level of the Nechako by dredging to something simulating what it used will give it the ability to spill into the Fraser."
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