BANGOR (AP) – Maine’s representatives in Washington have asked the Labor Department to reclassify Canadian loggers who work in Maine under a visa program that has not reached its cap and allow hundreds of loggers into the U.S.

The loggers are issued temporary nonagricultural work visas under a program that this year was capped at 66,000. The limit was reached in March, before many of the loggers had applied. The representatives want the loggers reclassified so they can be admitted on temporary agricultural work visas.

“There will be a calamitous drop in the ability to get wood to pulp and saw mills, and the economic consequences mostly for U.S. workers threaten to be enormous,” the delegates wrote in a letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

But that could take months, and in the meantime the Labor Department, working with the Maine Forest Products Council and the Maine Pulp and Paper Association, is advertising jobs in the northern woods by mailing out flyers with this week’s unemployment checks.

Steve Banahan, the sales manager for Moose River Lumber, said there is a severe labor shortage in the woods, but there is not an American work force with the right skills in the area. He said as many as 40 percent of the men who usually cut trees and operate cranes there come from Canada.

“It’s jobs that these guys have done for 100 years,” Banahan said. “We’ve always been short of labor, but this just made it much worse.”

He said industry estimates show the visa quota could cost $1.5 billion in lost business.

Further down the production chain, paper mills said they haven’t yet felt the pinch, though they expect to.

“That’s simply because we buy wood from people like Plum Creek,” said Ray Rickerts, wood procurement manager at Madison Paper Industries. “It’ll have a trickle-down effect.”

AP-ES-07-01-04 0217EDT