Pacific Lumber Files for Bankruptcy

Pacific Lumber and other subsidiaries of Maxxam Corporation filed bankruptcy papers in court in Corpus Christi, Texas late Thursday. The company's press release claims a "liquidity crisis from regulatory limitations" on logging, but it is actually due to a long-standing crisis of LIQUIDATION LOGGING, with most of the assets from that liquidation logging going to Houston rather than staying in Humboldt county. More than 2 decades after Maxxam's corporate-raider style take-over of Pacific Lumber, we have arrived where we have been headed.

While this is not unexpected, the repercussions are many, and we expect a complicated unfolding of events. When corporations file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a (usually several years-long) corporate reorganization commences, determining what debts will or will not be paid, who will manage the company, and who will make the decisions during the reorganization time.

We will soon get a more comprehensive update out, and are scheduling our next BACH agitate-activate-educate session (within 3 weeks), at which we will have lots more information. Stay tuned!

In the years since the 1985 takeover of PL by Charles Hurwitz and Maxxam, that Texas company has reaped huge benefits by logging off California's valuable redwoods, by selling off PL's assets, by reducing worker's benefits, and by profiting half a billion dollars from the Headwaters Deal purchase of Headwaters Reserve, the 7500-acre protected area. With all that money, they could have paid off their junk bond debt; they could have re-instituted sustainable logging on their 200,000 acres and ensured jobs and saw timber in perpetuity. But they didn't. They sent the money to Houston, not Humboldt. The light at the end of the tunnel is that the company could emerge from reorganization to be a Hurwitz-free and Maxxam-free company capable of making better business decisions than those that benefit only 5 people at the top.

You can read stories today in the Eureka Times-Standard, and get more information from BACH's newsletter last year on Pacific Lumber.