Pacific Lumber Co

Pacific Lumber Co., a timber giant on California's North Coast for more than 140 years, has filed for bankruptcy, contending that environmental restrictions imposed by the state have made it impossible to log enough to make a profit. After years of threatening bankruptcy, Pacific announced Friday that the company and its subsidiaries had filed for Chapter 11 protection a day earlier in U.S. District Court in Texas. The companies seeking to reorganize are Pacific, Scotia Pacific Co.

In an action hailed by environmentalists, a bankruptcy judge in Texas gave preliminary approval Friday to a plan by another timber company to reorganize financially troubled Pacific Lumber Co. and operate its 220,000 acres of Humboldt County land. Deciding the fate of the 145-year-old California forestry giant, Judge Richard S. Schmidt selected the proposal by decade-old Mendocino Redwood Co., largely owned by the Fisher family that founded the Gap Inc. clothing empire.

A company owned by the founders of Gap Inc. took control of the bankrupt Pacific Lumber Co. on Wednesday, marking a new chapter in the history of one of the country's oldest and most controversial timber firms. Pacific Lumber's logging practices over the last two decades under Maxxam Inc. of Houston have drawn widespread opposition from environmentalists. The deal was completed after Mendocino Redwood Co.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration pledged to fight any attempt to ease protections for old coastal redwoods that could be threatened by a timber company's bankruptcy filing. Pacific Lumber Co., a subsidiary of Houston-based Maxxam Corp., sought bankruptcy protection in Texas earlier this month, saying it could no longer make a profit because of logging restrictions on its 200,000 acres of timberlands in Humboldt County. The Scotia, Calif.

In a case involving Pacific Lumber Co.'s redwood groves, the California Supreme Court on Monday ruled that state water officials have the power to order timber companies to monitor the quality of streams and rivers near logging sites. Pacific Lumber Co. had challenged a state water board order that required it to measure the effects of logging about 700 acres on the south fork of the Elk River in Humboldt County.

Pacific Lumber Co., a financially troubled titan of California's timber industry, is offering to sell more than a quarter of its 220,000 acres of land in Humboldt County, a spokesman said Friday. The company informed federal securities regulators that it was marketing ranch lands, recreational areas and timberlands that did not figure in its core business as a major redwood lumber producer.

A former official of the North Coast timber giant Pacific Lumber Co. contends in a lawsuit that the company's president ordered him to conceal the presence of underground contaminants to avoid a costly cleanup and to expedite construction of sawmill facilities in Humboldt County. A Pacific Lumber spokesman said the allegations were not true and added that the plaintiff's contention that he had been fired also was not true. Humboldt County Dist. Atty.

The Schwarzenegger administration is poised to allow financially troubled Pacific Lumber Co. to remove special habitat protections on more than 2,000 acres covered by a historic agreement creating the Headwaters Preserve of ancient redwoods in Humboldt County. In exchange, Pacific Lumber has proposed placing the environmental restrictions on an equivalent amount of its land that company and wildlife officials say has superior conservation value.

Timber giant Pacific Lumber Co. has told the Schwarzenegger administration that unless it is allowed to cut more trees, the firm may file for bankruptcy, which it says would likely terminate environmental safeguards promised as part of a $480-million deal struck more than five years ago. The federal and state governments paid the company that money to protect several thousand of acres of ancient redwoods under a 1999 agreement preserving the Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County.

Whenever Pacific Lumber Co. planned to dispatch helicopters to log its nearby redwood groves, the company would phone Christine Rising at her vine-draped bungalow above the Eel River. After finding someone to care for her horses, dogs, cats and pot-bellied pig, Rising, 51, would pack her clothes and head down the dirt road toward a Eureka hotel about an hour's drive away.