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Logging beetle kill pine in B.C. |
| By Paul Luft |
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 For the past five or six years, many B.C. contractors have focused
almost exclusively on harvesting stands of dead lodgepole pine.
Now that the mountain pine beetle has affected over 13.5 million hectares of B.C.’s forest lands – an area roughly four times the size of Vancouver Island – Interior logging contractors are more than familiar with harvesting vast swaths of dead or dying trees.
Lee Todd, based in the logging community of Williams Lake, B.C., has
dealt with beetle-kill timber throughout most of his 30-year career,
stretching back to major outbreaks in the Chilcotin region in the late
1970s.
Currently, 80 to 90 per cent of his logging activity involves
beetle-kill timber, and he doesn’t see that changing any time soon.
Todd recently formed a new company called Newco, which logged 300,000
cubic metres of beetle-kill timber last year. His previous company,
Eldorado Enterprises, brought in 600,000 cubic metres – 10,000
truckloads – of beetle-kill timber in 2006 and 2007.
For contractors like Todd who log beetle-kill timber, the basic
practices of clearcut harvesting remain the same. But operating in
stands of predominantly dead trees brings its own set of challenges.
“It’s all the same machinery,” says Todd. “The challenge is that there
is a lot more fall down or waste.
"It’s a lot harder to get a sawlog out
of this timber.”
For the feller buncher operator – Newco uses three Tigercat 870s --
brittle wood means more tops will break off and fall down. Trees have
to be handled more carefully or they’ll break into pieces.
Depending on timber quality, the workflow can bog down considerably at the processing stage, explains Todd
“Once the logs are dead, they start cracking and splitting, so you
really have to be selective -- you really have to analyze each tree on
its own. The processor operator has now become a grader man or quality
control man. He’s the bottleneck, having to judge which logs the mill
will be happy with.”
His company has three Caterpillar 320s outfitted with Waratah 622B heads. The oldest machine is three years old.
Todd adds that the quality of stands “varies tremendously” depending on a wide range of factors.
“Sometimes in a lesser kill area, where it’s only been dead 2 or 3
years, your production might only drop 5-10 per cent. But we’ve had
some stands where we’ve thrown as high as 40 per cent away. We could
only get one sawlog off of the big end of a tree, and the rest of the
wood – because of the cracks and deterioration – just gets thrown away
in the brush pile.”
Increased ground disturbance is also an issue. Without a healthy forest
of trees drinking up thousands of litres of water per day, the water
table rises and the terrain turns boggy.
Todd employs wide flotation tires or wider tracks on the feller
bunchers in an attempt to minimize the ground pressure. For skidders,
Newco uses Caterpillar 545s, along with a new Tigercat 635D featuring
six-wheel drive.
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