The loss of forest, especially pine plantations, means a cloud of economic uncertainty hangs over Tumbarumba in southern NSW.
When bushfires razed the outskirts of Tumbarumba in southern New South Wales on New Year's Eve, residents on the forest fringes lost everything: their houses, stock, infrastructure and livelihoods.
At Tumbarumba, Hyne Timber directly employs 230 people and just as many indirectly. It's one of the largest sawmills in the southern hemisphere."That's about 40 per cent of our available logs going forward, so it's a substantial impact to us in the future," mill manager Marcus Fenske said. "It really is a story that Australians need to hear because we have had a major hit to what is really one of our major regional industries in Australia, that's the timber industries."
Hyne Timber estimates it will have to spend an additional $10 million a year, at a time when margins are slim.A race against the clockIn a nearly cleared glade in the Bago Forest, Ged Back spends long days operating a log-loader, plucking freshly sawn pine logs from neat piles with a giant mechanical claw and loading them onto trucks to be hauled to a mill.
"They talk about it being between nine months and a year that we've got for the log that has been burnt, getting it off the stump and into the mill," Mr Fenske said.
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