Mixture of more goods and bads to report…

Spoke at length today with USA manufacturing team, working towards possible domestic raw material strategies.  We’ve made some progress, and have a handful of trucks of material for each plant in CA and VA.  We’ll work through these loads, see how they run through the mills.  Possible that one source may have a consistent supply of a decent volume for us.  Not a whole lot out there however; domestic suppliers have been even with demand for some time.  We’re also working to procure some loads internationally. 

Marcelo (GM of Foraction) came home today to find his water and power back on; he resides in Concepcion.  The unrest has settled as the military has come in to “manage” things.  Power and water being restored in areas, and trucks are slowly making their way in with supplies for grocery stores, fuel for gas stations, etc.  Great news.

Looks like power will be back at Foraction plant next week, and we’ll be ready to produce.  We’re going to run at full capacity, and keep building up blocks and blanks for the USA plants… hoping that when ports open up, we’ll be able to grab as much vessel container space as possible for shipment to the states.

Kevin, Ruben and Marcelo attempted to get to the Coronel port themselves today, however the traffic was far too jamming.  There’s a curfew in place that only allows activity from 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. – not much time to get things done.  They’re going to try again for the ports tomorrow.

Road repair and ports coming online are still the unknowns, and really the “big two” that affect Windsor Mill.  Will keep reporting with info on progress that we receive.

We’ve heard from many of you in regard to projections and placing future orders.  This information is helping, thank you for the extra effort on your part… it will provide better insight for all of us.

Stressing again two important points:

1)  We will accept no orders from new customers until we’re 110% confident our raw material supply is consistent and plentiful.  We are committed to our current customer base;

2)   From the “About” section: “The purpose of this Blog is to be completely transparent about the recent catastrophe in Chile, and how it may or may not affect WindsorONE supply lines, so that our customers are able to make informed decisions regarding their own supply of quality trim boards for their respective Lumberyards.”

If there are going to be holes in our supply… you’ll hear it from us first.

In Solidarity,

Craig