Chamber Tours: Louisiana Pacific Corp.

   The monthly Cullman Area Chamber of Commerce Existing Business and Industry Committee and the annual Farm-City industry tour combined recently for a joint tour of Hanceville's Louisiana Pacific Corporation, one of the south's premier manufacturers of oriented strand board.
    Chamber members, local officials, Farm City committee members and students from a local high school were all present for the event, which allowed the tour group a glimpse into the process by which Louisiana Pacific turns raw logs into particle board products including flooring and roofing materials and other engineered wood products for the housing industry.
    LP Corp's Hanceville operation is one of 14 plants located throughout the United States and Canada, said production superintendent Kevin Campbell.

Chamber president Sonya Hembree, right, learns more about LP Corp's Hanceville operation.

"We're a little different here from other industries," Campbell said of LP Corp. "We bring in a log on one end and turn it into a product at the other end." Campbell said that LP Corp. was founded in 1973 in a split from industry giant Georgia Pacific.

Farm City Committee member and County Extension Agent Gregg
Hodges, left, shakes hands with LP production superintendent
Kevin Campbell during the recent tour.

    The Hanceville plant opened in 1994 and is managed by Richard Southeard, Jr. Louisiana Pacific is headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and is chaired by CEO Mark Suwyn.
    Locally, LP employs 140 persons.
    "We work two twelve hour shifts each day and have four shifts each week. Our plant operates 24 hours a day. Most all of our employees work four days on and three days off during a seven day week," Campbell said.
    Much of the the operation at Louisiana Pacific is automated, the work done by huge, two-story high machines that chip the logs into small wafers, which are then dried and are mixed with resin and pressed into large sheets of what is known in the industry as oriented strand board, or OSB.
    Campbell said the Hanceville plant produces roughly 1 million feet of board per day.

"We are a heavily automated operation, but it takes people to run these machines and to keep them running," Campbell said. "We value our employees highly. It's a family atmosphere here. There's not a person who works here who I wouldn't take home to have dinner with my family. Most of our employees are from around this area. It's a good place to work. I love it."

    Local vendors for LP engineered wood products include Buettner Brothers Lumber Co., Walker Brothers and Lowe's.
    According to Campbell, safety of both LP employees and visitors is of the utmost importance to the company.
    "We have our own 24-man fire brigade made up of employees," Campbell said. "Several of them are actually volunteer firemen from local communities. The most important thing we stress to our employees is the safety of themselves and their co-workers."
    For more information on Louisiana Pacific, visit the company's website at www.lpcorp.com or contact the Cullman Area Chamber of Commerce.

Cullman County Economic Development director Randall Shedd,
Airport Manager Bob Burns and Rich Bunis of Wallace State
College and the Chamber of Commerce enjoy the tour of
Louisiana Pacific's Hanceville plant.

Due to company policy, no pictures were allowed inside the Louisiana Pacific plant in Hanceville during the Chamber of Commerce/Farm City tour. In the interest of further illustrating what goes on at Louisiana Pacific, we have researched the manufacturing process by which Oriented Strand Board (OSB), the principal product of LP Corp., is made. The diagrams in the virtual tour above are fairly accurate at outlining the process used by LP at their Hanceville plant, and are used courtesy of the Structural Board Association. For more information about this process, visit their website at www.osbguide.com.