The Fort Frances AbitibiBowater mill began shutting its processes down Tuesday because of noted excesses in the daily biochemical oxygen demand limit in the mill’s effluent.
However, by Friday afternoon an official at the company said the mill had found a solution to the problem and would be restarting operations as early as Friday night.
Jean-Philippe Cote, director of public affairs for Abitibi in Montreal, said Friday the company was preparing information on the technical details, but was assured that a solution had been found to the problem which had brought the mill to a halt for several days.
BOD is a chemical procedure for determining the uptake rate of dissolved oxygen by the biological organisms in a body of water. It is widely used as an indication of quality of water.
Cote said that most of the mill’s employees remained working last week during the shutdown.
However, the lack of pulp production by the Fort Frances mill had the neighboring Boise Inc. mill reworking some of its operations as well.
Bob Anderson, Boise’s public affairs manager, explained that Abitibi is one of the major suppliers of pulp to the Falls mill. He said the Canadian mill typically pipes hundreds of tons of pulp in its wet slurry form across the border to Boise.
So, unsure of the length of shutdown, the local Boise mill ordered baled pulp to be trucked in from another Boise site in Wallula, Wash.
“These two mills are very integrated in many, many ways,” Anderson said, explaining that the local Boise and Abitibi mills share other products as well.
The lack of pulp at Boise necessitated the No. 4 paper machine be shut down Thursday, and several workers were sent home temporarily while the company awaited more pulp for full-scale operations.
Anderson said the company earlier in the week exhausted a backup supply of pulp that serves as a contingency plan for such situations, and decided to shut down one machine and send about 24 workers home.
Friday afternoon, Anderson was unsure of the duration of the No. 4 machine shutdown at Boise.
