Aluminum plant's shutdown cuts jobs at Port of Everett

Tuesday, February 20, 2001

By MIKE BARBER SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

When the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. in Montana shut down last month after 45 years of business, the shudder was felt 500 miles to the west, where the Port of Everett's big alumina dome, through which 352,000 tons of alumina ore from Australia pass every year on the way to Columbia Falls, is now starting to echo.

Columbia Falls became the ninth of 10 Pacific Northwest aluminum plants to douse its fires rather than continue paying the West Coast's wild, spiraling energy costs, so the small but proud Port of Everett's million-ton-a-year business dropped by about a third overnight. The energy crisis fans way out beyond utilities, governments and electric bills, hitting the livelihoods and incomes of people and their communities.

"The trickle-down effect is astronomical for a small port like ours," said Gig Larson, business agent for International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 32. While Columbia Falls was laying off half of its 600 aluminum workers, about 18 of Everett's longshore workers who once worked around-the-clock to unload as many as 15 shiploads of alumina ore per year, suddenly saw their options shrivel.

"The bottom line is we took a hit just like they did, and the port took a hit," Larson said. "It doesn't just happen in Columbia Falls. It really adds up all over."

The lack of ore ships means no work for six longshore workers normally assigned to each ship, in three shifts per day.

"That's 12,000 man-hours of work a year that is gone," Larson said, adding that it could mean layoffs if the slack can't be taken up elsewhere.

Also at risk are the jobs of several Columbia Falls workers assigned to the site, three Port of Everett workers, a half-dozen foremen and clerks, and two weighmasters who rode herd on loading the bauxite containing the alumina powder into railroad cars.

Everett Port Director John Mohr said Columbia Falls told him not to expect another ore ship this year. While the five-acre alumina dome is a large chunk of the total tonnage through the port, Mohr said that doesn't equal a comparable financial hit.

"Boat cargoes typically aren't real high revenue cargoes," Mohr said. "Alumina is not a huge chunk of our business, but it's not small. It means we will have another $300,000 to account for in terms of what the impacts are on our part."

In the last decade, the port has been diversifying, moving away from logs and wood products, another staple that is in decline, Mohr said.

"We were transitioning away from that;" he said, and alumina was part of the diversification.

Boeing's specialized aircraft parts are an increasing share of the port's import business. And last July, Everett entered the trans-Pacific trade when the North Pacific Steamship Corp. began running two 1,100 container-ton ships exclusively between Kobe, Japan, and Everett.

The port, with eight berths on 100 acres, also operates a 4,000-ton refrigerated warehouse and handles agricultural products, including apples, pears, potatoes and frozen beef and poultry.

The alumina dome, meanwhile, remains filled with ore that isn't going anywhere right now. Finding a new tenant is a ways off, Mohr said.

"The entire Northwest aluminum industry is decimated," said Tom Payne, Columbia Falls Aluminum Corp's plant manager.

The only raw material used in aluminum production that is found in the Northwest is the cheap electricity once used to smelt ore brought in from around the world.

The Northwest is home to 10 -- nearly half -- of the nation's 23 aluminum plants, but with nine plants shut down because of high energy costs, as many as 8,000 workers are idled in Montana Oregon and Washington.

For each of those workers, there are likely three others who are not employed in an allied or aluminum-making service industry, Payne said.

The shutdowns are "a huge loss to the Pacific Northwest of good paying jobs, and there is the specter that they may not start again," he said.

And since the industry was located here in part due to cheap power and availability, it now faces the possibility of going the way of the long-dead steel-mills that once comprised the East Coast and Midwestern "rust belt."

Since no significant power generating sources have been built for 10 years, older industries like aluminum are competing for power that is increasingly drained by the modern information sector, notably by Internet service providers, Payne said.

"Server farms are huge users, using 30 to 40 megawatts of power each," he said, as much as the University of Washington uses, or a small steel mill like Seattle's Birmingham Steel.

The competition could grow more intense, and ruinous, with 24 new server farms being proposed for the Northwest, capable of drawing close to 700 megawatts -- more than half Seattle's average use, he said.

In the meantime, all Columbia Falls and Everett can do is try to limit the effects of the energy crisis. Columbia Falls will use the downtime to make some maintenance improvements and do capital projects.

It will pay all its workers through the rest of the year based upon a contract with the Bonneville Power Administration.

Part of the contract, renegotiated in 1995, allows Columbia Falls, Kaiser Aluminum and Golden Northwest Aluminum to resell electricity they purchased, using some of the revenue to cover continued pay and benefits for plant employees.

"We're strictly dependent on energy prices," Payne said. "If they are reasonable next January, then we will restart. If they are not reasonable, we won't."

http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/local/alum20.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 20, 2001