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Sonny Geer of T.A. Geer & Sons sawmill in Culpeper stands in his deeply rutted and empty lumberyard. The yard would normally be filled with timber, but a rainy spring and summer have made it difficult to get logging equipment in and out of the woods. |
Sonny Geer is at a Culpeper convenience store pumping gas into his personal pickup truck at 10:45 on a weekday morning.
That's not unusual for many people, but it is for the 61-year-old Geer. Normally at this time of day, he would be at his family-owned sawmill using a huge forklift to take logs to the sawyer.
Not today. There is no sawyer and there are no logs at the T.A. Geer & Sons mill on Eggbornsville Road. It has been this way since the wettest period in recent memory set in six months ago.
The seemingly never-ending rains are about to put Geer out of business.
"It has about broke me," he says as he leans back against his truck and ponders a critical situation. "I can't go on much longer."
While the rain has had an obvious impact on farm crops, the effect on other weather-dependent businesses such as Geer's is not always so evident.
The sawmill buys, cuts and hauls its own logs. Geer's crew has succeeded in bringing in only one tractor-trailer load in the past two weeks.
"We had to hook skidders to the front and back of the truck to get that load out of the woods," he says. "The ground is saturated; it's got no bottom."
Right now, Geer's crew is attempting to log a tract along State Routes 649 and 698 near Montross in Westmoreland County. Under normal conditions, his men would have had the mature timber cut within five weeks.
"We've been there five weeks and we've barely got started," he says.
Geer says forest wardens have forbidden his crew to cut while the ground is so wet and area residents have threatened to call the state police and have him cited because his trucks throw mud on the roads every time he does get a load of logs.
Right now, the veteran sawmill operator is caught between a rock and a hard place--or, more accurately, a soft place.
"We haven't sawed a full week in three months," Geer says. "It's been a day and a half here, two days there."
Forty-five inches of precipitation have already fallen in Culpeper so far this year, equal to the county's average annual total. Other areas have been hit even harder.
The rainy weather has presented financial hardships for his workers, too.
"Most of my [13] mill employees are on unemployment," Geer says. "One, who has been with me since we opened [in 1985], left and went to work somewhere else."
Members of Geer's eight-man logging crew are also struggling through layoffs and hard financial times.
"Nothing like this has ever happened since we took over the mill," he says.
In an average year, Geer's mill turns out about 7 million board feet of lumber, which is used to make furniture, hardwood floor boards, moldings and fencing boards. His company grosses about $3.5 million a year.
"We'll be lucky to gross half that this year," he says. "I know we won't saw half as much lumber as we normally do."
Forecasters say that Central Virginia is in for a stretch of dry weather. Geer keeps waiting.
As he fills his tank, he notes that 3 inches of rain fell the night before in the area his crew is logging in Westmoreland.
"It just keeps on coming down," he says.
Geer looks up at a cloudy sky and shakes his head.
"I keep hearing that [the government] is going to help farmers," he says. "Nobody's offering to help sawmill operators."
To reach DONNIE JOHNSTON: DJohn40330@aol.com
