Story Photos
 Photo by Bill Wagner Jim Sims, Equa-Chlor vice president for operations, and Tim Bistolas, company president, on Monday walk through what will become the cell room building -- where electrify will run through salt water to create chlorine, hydrogen and caustic soda. The plant is scheduled to be on-line in January. |
Wanted: 50 skilled workers
Tuesday, August 23, 2005 8:44 AM PDT
By Courtney Sherwood
Printable version
E-mail this articleAs the region's job picture continues to improve, an under-construction chlorine company has started looking for 50 skilled blue collar workers to help bring its plant online this January.
Last week, the state Employment Security Department announced that Cowlitz County's July unemployment rate was down to 6.9 percent -- tied with May's rate for the lowest it's been since 2000.
Equa-Chlor executives said Monday that they'd like to nudge that figure down even lower.
Workers willing to jump through a rigorous series of hoops could be eligible for jobs paying $14 to $27 per hour, said Jim Sims, vice president for operations at Equa-Chlor, based in Portland.
Job candidates will have to take eight hours worth of tests to assess their technical abilities and social skills, then go through a series of interviews and finally a physical, Sims said. The tests alone could take several weeks to complete.
"People get intimated by the testing, but the process seems to work very, very well," Sims said. "We're getting great people."
The company plans to fill all its openings within the next three months, in order to have a trained and ready team on day one, Sims said.
Equa-Chlor's plant is being built on land leased from Weyerhaeuser, constructed on the skeleton of the paper mill's chlorine facilities, which were shut down in 1999.
The company is using some of the original infrastructure, but most of Equa-Chlor's plant will be new, Sims said.
"It's like taking an old house, removing all the siding, stripping it down to the bare walls, and then rebuilding, rewiring and putting on all new siding," he said.
When complete, Equa-Chlor's plant will make its chemical products by running electricity through salty brine.
The current will cause the salt to separate into chlorine, hydrogen and caustic soda --- all products Equa-Chlor plans to sell --- with no emissions and no other byproducts.
Already Equa-Chlor has clients poised to buy its chemicals, Sims said.
One --- HASA Inc. --- a bleach manufacturer based in California, is subleasing space from Equa-Chlor and plans to use Equa-Chlor-produced chlorine when it becomes available.
There's room for more tenant-business partners on Equa-Chlor's 15 acres of leased land, Sims said, and several companies already are interested.
When Weyerhaeuser closed its bleach plant, most Western pulp and paper makers had stopped using chlorine as an integral part of their manufacturing process, Equa-Chlor president Timothy E. Bistolas said.
Without a big industry market, five chlorine plants in the Pacific Northwest shut their doors, he said.
"There will be only two chlorine and caustic soda plants in the Western United States, once this plant is completed," Bistolas said. "But the market is growing again," with strong demand for chlorine to use in water treatment.
As the company rebuilds, safety is a major concern, Sims said.
In 1994, Weyerhaeuser's bleach plant leaked 4,200 pounds of chlorine when a computer showed that an open valve was closed.
Though there were no serious injuries in that incident, chlorine is highly corrosive and can be fatal.
Sims, who was manager of Weyerhaeuser's bleach plant when it closed down in 1999, said safety is a top priority at the new facility, which will have redundant safety systems with computerized and non-computer backups.
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