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No Philippine Lumber in Prospect ]or U. S. For a Long Time
The prospect of the United States getting any lumber from the Philippines is still very remote, according to Walter G. Scrim, of Los Angeles, president of the Philippine Mahogany Manufacturers InTport Association. How long it will be is problematical, but it rvould be a good guess that it will be a year or more before production over there can be stepped up to where there is anything to spare over and above the building needs of the Islands themslves. At the present time it is understood that the only lumber being manufactured in the Philippines is being turned out by the Army Engineers. They are operating powerful portable sawmills at numerous places in the Islands, but the output is naturally very small, and the demands for lumber for every sort of building and rebuilding in the Islands is tremendous. l."It is reported that M. D. Thompson, of Philadelphia, an official of the Insular Lumber Company, is one of a number of Americans recently returned to this country from the Islands. He said on returning that when he left Minila there was just 79,000 feet of lumber in the city, whereas even in normal times the Islands consume four hundred million feet of lumber annually, and on top of this there is the tremendous amount of war destruction that must be rePlaced.
Nearly every sawmill in the Isands was destroyed by the Japs, including the biggest of them, that of the Insular Lumber Company, at Fabrica, Occidental Negros. They found the mill destroyed by fire, but salvaged most of the machinery for one of the band mills, which the Japs had crated and ready for shipment, evidently to Japan, when the Americans got there. The Findlay-Millar Timber Company, represented by Mr. Scrim, had a big mill at Kolambugan, and a smaller plant near Manila. Both were destroyed, the big mill having been fired by the management at Government orders, to save it from the Japs. Besides the big mill plant they destroyed thirty million feet of lumber. The lumber made a spectacular fire, and is reported, to have burned for weeks before it was finally consumed. The'army is operating portable mills at these plants now. It is also operating at the Insular plant at Fabrica, using the small mills and cutting a large supply of logs they found in the pond and in storage. The Americans who have just been over there say that the Army Engineers are doing a wonderful job of getting out lumber with all the attendant difficulties, as most ol the lZ4 mills that were there before the war, were destroyed by the Japs.
Chief of Army Engineers in charge of lumber operations