Pulp mills formerly depended on sawmills for chips - what do they do now?

Implications: It has been reported that fully half the sawmills in British Columbia are now down for lack of orders.  This means that all those pulp mills who formerly purchased great quantities of chips (in some cases, 55% of their total fiber supply) have had to resort to other means.....(1) additional logging of timber stands and then chipping the logs themselves or (2) shutting down.  A number of mills have been forced to take several weeks at a time to allow their chip piles to build back up. This came at a time when most NBSK mills were oversold and behind in shipments.....adversely affecting their bottom line.  In some cases this just meant more red ink.  Wood costs in Canada all already  six times higher than those producers in Brazil,Chile and Indonesia.  It would seem the last thing they needed was to have their chip supply cut off. But...what about the sawmills?  Three things must happen - home building must pick up, warehouses must empty out and then prices must recover.  4Q 2009?

Analysis: The fall off in home building and office construction has not only hurt the dimension lumber business (2 x 4s, 2 x 10s) but also the hardwood specialty business as well.   Western Pennsylvania is known for its top quality products made from cherry, maple and white oak.  The sawmills still operating are, in many cases, producing fire wood at $4/cord.  This is a far cry from 2005/06 when they were busy cutting wood for veneers, cabinets, trim and furniture.  Containers went daily to Europe.
Black Cherry in 2005 sold for $1,572/thousand board feet (1" thick by one square foot) but today it sells for $1,064 when there are buyers.  By contrast, in the Pacific NW, benchmark SFP (Spruce-Fir-Pine) sold for $350/thousand board feet in 2005 but went as low as $169 earlier this year.  Rather than sell at those prices some sawmills had to shut down.  Back in Western PA even half the Amish sawmills are shut down for lack of business (and we all know how frugal the Amish are!).
Buchanan Forest Products is the latest Canadian to announce the shutdown of their Ontario sawmills putting another 120 men out of work.
With greatly reduced chip supplies most market pulp mills have had to take downtime....a partial list includes Canfor, Catalyst, Tembec and Pope & Talbot's BC mills (back when they were still running).
These have been black weeks for BC sawmills - a sawmill near Campbell River, on Vancouver Island, is scheduled to close permanently putting 257 people out of work.  Another mill, Elk Falls, BC has been for sale for over a year with no takers.  It will probably also close permanently. A mill in Ladysmith, near Nainamo (P&T's Harmac mill) for forced to close permanently putting 260 out of work. Another in Fort James putting 280 out of work. And where are many of these workers now?   In Alberta working in the oil industry.
According to the Forest Products Association of Canada there have been 46 sawmill closures since January 2007 with 5,747 jobs lost.
And forest products industry experts say this industry can expect low wood demand for the next 12 months.  Will there be any workers around to start up the sawmills when the time comes?