LaSalle Lumber dedicates new sawmill after first shipments
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URANIA, La. -- LaSalle Lumber Co. has dedicated its new $115 million sawmill in central Louisiana.

Earlier, LaSalle shipped the first truckload of lumber from its new sawmill in Urania. The mill began start-up operations in December and made it first shipment in March.

“We’re very happy with how the start-up process has gone to date,” LaSalle Lumber plant manager Nick Landi said earlier when the first shipment was made.

Landi said the first truckload was sold to Hixson Lumber Sales, a large multi-state supplier of wood products. The new, highly-automated sawmill took less than one year to build, and currently employs 100 people. At full operation, running two 10-hour shifts, four days per week, it will employ approximately 115 people. The mill will require approximately 850,000 tons of wood annually to produce about 200,000,000 board feet of lumber, according to Landi.

The mill is a joint venture between Hunt Forest Products of Ruston, La., and Tolko Industries, Ltd., a family-owned Canadian company that produces a wide range of forest products for customers around the world. Tolko, based in Vernon, British Columbia, owns a 50 percent share in the LaSalle Lumber mill.

During recent test runs, Landi said it took approximately 11 minutes for a log fresh off a logging truck to be converted into green lumber ready for the kilns.

“We’ve got an optimized log in-feed system that runs at 550 to 600 feet per minute, and a trimmer that can handle 140 pieces of lumber per minute.”

LaSalle Lumber is located on approximately 125 acres of the old 285-acre Louisiana Pacific sawmill site. Drax Biomass occupies the other 160 acres of the site, and the LaSalle Lumber sawmill supplies residuals and wood fiber to Drax for use in manufacturing wood pellets. See www.tolko.com and http://www.huntforpro.com.

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Karl Forth

Karl D. Forth is online editor for CCI Media. He also writes news and feature stories in FDMC Magazine, in addition to newsletters and custom publishing projects. He is also involved in event organization, and compiles the annual FDM 300 list of industry leaders. He can be reached at [email protected].