Appeal Tribune Wednesday, January 11, 2017 3B
New wood technology may
offer hope for timber industry
GILLIAN FLACCUS AND PHUONG LE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
RIDDLE — John Redfield watches as
his son moves a laser-guided precision
saw the size of a semi-truck wheel into
place over a massive panel of wood.
Redfield’s fingers are scarred from a
lifetime of cutting wood and now, after
decades of decline in the logging busi-
ness, he has new hope that his son, too,
can make a career shaping the timber
felled in southern Oregon’s forests.
That’s because Redfield and his son
work at D.R. Johnson Lumber Co., one of
two U.S. timber mills making a new wood
product that’s the buzz of the construc-
tion industry. It’s called cross-laminated
timber, or CLT, and it’s made like it
sounds: rafts of 2-by-4 beams aligned in
perpendicular layers, then glued — or
laminated — together like a giant sand-
wich.
The resulting panels are lighter and
less energy-intensive than concrete and
steel and much faster to assemble on-site
than regular timber, proponents say. Be-
cause the grain in each layer is at a right
angle to the one below and above it,
there’s a counter-tension built into the
panels that supporters say makes them
strong enough to build even the tallest
skyscrapers.
“We believe that two to five years out,
down the road, we could be seeing this
grow from just 20 percent of our busi-
ness to potentially 60 percent of our busi-
ness,” said Redfield, D.R. Johnson’s
chief operating officer. “We’re seeing
some major growth factors.”
From Maine to Arkansas to the Pacif-
ic Northwest, the material is sparking in-
terest among architects, engineers and
researchers. Many say it could infuse
struggling forest communities like Rid-
dle with new economic growth, while re-
ducing the carbon footprint of urban
construction with a renewable building
material.
Visually blemished wood that cur-
rently goes to waste can be used in the
middle layers of a CLT panel without sac-
rificing strength or look. Supporters say
it could bring sawmills back online while
improving forest health through thin-
ning dense stands and making use of low-
value wood and local tree species. Trees
as small as 5 inches in diameter at the top
and those damaged by pests and wildfire
are prime candidates.
But challenges remain before CLT be-
comes as common in the United States as
it is in Europe and Canada, and not all
builders are sold.
U.S. building codes generally place
height limits on all-wood buildings for
safety reasons, though a special commit-
tee of the International Code Council is
investigating potential changes to ad-
dress the use of CLT in such structures.
And research is still underway on criti-
cal questions of how these buildings
withstand fire and earthquakes in high-
seismic regions.
Building codes in Oregon allow cut-
ting-edge designs using new technology
like CLT in some cases, but only after
PHOTOS BY GILLIAN FLACCUS, AP
In this Nov. 11, 2016, photo, a forklift driver moves a newly assembled panel of cross-laminated timber, or CLT, to a stack in the production facility
of D.R. Johnson Lumber Co., in Riddle, Ore. D.R. Johnson is one of just two companies in the United States currently able to produce CLT panels.
In this Nov. 11, 2016, photo, John Redfield,
chief operating officer of D.R. Johnson
Lumber Co. in Riddle, Ore., poses for a photo
as he shows an example of a cross-laminated
timber, or CLT, panel that underwent a
flammability test.
rigorous testing and an intensive ap-
proval process.
That can make such projects cost-
prohibitive, said Peter Dusicka, an engi-
neering professor at Portland State Uni-
versity who’s been researching the
strength of CLT panels.
“The early adopters are looking at it
and seeing it as a good opportunity,” but
before CLT can take off, there will have
to be more examples to get people excit-
ed and more mills producing it, said
Thomas DeLuca, professor and director
of University of Washington’s School of
Environmental and Forest Sciences.
SmartLam in Montana is the other
company producing CLT panels.
This spring, cross-laminated timber
will get its ultimate test in the United
States when a Portland architectural
firm breaks ground on a 12-story wood
building in the city’s trendy Pearl Dis-
trict. It would be the tallest all-wood
building in the world constructed in a
seismic zone and the tallest all-wood
building in North America.
An all-wood building in Norway is tall-
er, but is not in a seismic zone. An 18-sto-
ry wood building in British Columbia is
also taller, but rests on a traditional con-
crete core.
Lever Architecture is using $1.5 mil-
lion it won in a tall wood building compe-
tition sponsored by the U.S. Department
of Agriculture and the softwood indus-
try that’s intended to promote CLT as a
domestic building material. A 10-story
residential tower in New York City also
got $1.5 million.
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The Portland firm has been working
with scientists at Portland State Univer-
sity and Oregon State University to test
the panels’ strength by subjecting them
to hundreds of thousands of pounds of
pressure. They are also testing various
methods for joining the massive panels
together.
“We’re looking at creating a resilient
design, a design that could withstand a
major earthquake — basically the earth-
quake that we all worry about — and be
repaired,” said Thomas Robinson, foun-
der of Lever Architecture.
The results of the structural testing in
Oregon will be made public for other
U.S. designers, bringing the material one
step closer to the mainstream, Dusicka
said.
Back in Riddle, a tiny town tucked in
the mist-shrouded forests of Douglas
County, Redfield is once more excited
about timber in a place where logging
used to be king.
The 125-employee company has been
inundated with visitors from around
country interested in touring their new
CLT business expansion.
Watching as layers of beams whirred
through a glue machine, Redfield said:
“We’re able to take wood that may be
turned into chips or pulp and turn it into a
product that’s pretty exciting.”
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