New sawmill opens outside of Flagstaff to help prevent wildfires

FLAGSTAFF, AZ (AZFamily) — The largest sawmill in the Southwest officially opened Tuesday just outside of Flagstaff.

It will help Coconino County on its mission of forest restoration to prevent major wildfires.

Since 2010, wildfires have burned over a quarter million acres in Coconino County.

Coconino County Flood Control District community relations manager Sean Golightly said the county takes wildfires and their consequences very seriously.

“Wildfire and post-wildfire flooding are the two biggest public safety threats in Coconino County,” Golightly said.

Both the county and the U.S. Forest Service have spent tens of millions of dollars on forest restoration, such as prescribed burns and thinning, which can be very expensive by itself.

Forest Restoration director Jay Smith in Coconino County Public Works said that without a mill, it can end up costing the county more to do nothing with the wood.

“The timber has so little value or if we’re trying to remove biomass, there’s a cost involved versus just the timber paying for itself to get out of the woods,” Smith said.

Restoration Forest Products invested $120 million to open the sawmill, which will create 170 local jobs.

Golightly said this brand-new sawmill in Bellemont is a game changer for local forest restoration.

It will process 120 million board feet of lumber annually, enough to support about 30,000 acres of forest restoration.

“Once you take that tree out, you have to have something to do with it,” Golightly said. “Without something to do with that wood and biomass that comes of the forest restoration projects, it’s very hard to move forest restoration forward.”

But this is just one piece of the puzzle. The county has also been working on post-wildfire flood prevention, something the federal government has paid close attention to.

USDA Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment Dr. Homer Wilkes was in Coconino County for the mill ribbon-cutting and to see $100 million in federal grants for post-wildfire flood prevention.

“So to see this work being done here to protect this community is just something we all strive to try to make sure it happens in a very timely fashion,” Wilkes said.

Wilkes said there will be a major federal announcement next week in Flagstaff based around Coconino County’s fire and flood prevention work.

“They’re the tip of the sphere of what we want to do in most of these places. It starts right here. This is an example of we can utilize,” Wilkes said.

Under Secretary Wilkes will be in Phoenix on Thursday to sign an agreement to expand forest restoration on federal land.

See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.

Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.