Business Publications

Like working on the moon: CFI checks in on BC's own Men in Black - loggers and sawmillers at the front lines of this year's massive fire salvage

Canadian Forest Industries, Nov/Dec 2003 by Sorensen, Jean

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BC's massive forest fires this year have created a major salvage job. As crews throughout the province move in to harvest and mill the black wood, the immediate problem is carbon: it clogs filters, shorts out electrical circuits, and dulls saws. It fouls clothing, logs, and equipment, and is fatal to pulp chip production. Severely burned areas also create a hostile environment. Trees are unstable, and traction for equipment is minimal.

Soot and char make it difficult for equipment operators to judge wood quality of the stems being harvested.

"It's like working on the surface of the moon with a bunch of black sticks," according to contractor Jeff Kineshanko of Kineshanko Logging in BC's Interior. Kineshanko, who worked on the Salmon Arm fire cleanup, explains how hot fires strip off duff, leaving only hardpan and rock. Stringent quality control in log handling and sorting are bush basics to get the best wood to the mill and pull out the best set of recovery numbers.

Political Problems

BC's chief forester, Larry Pedersen, told a BC Wood Forum meeting in Vancouver that the question of how much burn wood BC could harvest is a "sensitive" one, as there is a two to three year window before burn wood deteriorates beyond value. Yet at the same time, BC is facing a devastating attack by the mountain pine beetle, also crying out for a salvage solution.

For his part, BC Premier Gordon Campbell estimated the beetle's infestation as an area three times the size of Vancouver Island or four million hectares. It totals 160 million cubic metres of "prime timber," which is twice the BC annual harvest. "This year alone, the pine beetle has infested four times the area this year's fires consumed," Campbell said.

And that's with BC recording a landmark year in fire devastation with over 700 fires so far this season and 180 000 hectares burned. Large fires include: OK Mountain Park at 26 000 ha, McLure (26 500 ha), Lamb Creek (Cranbrook - 11 000 ha), Chilko Lake (29 200 ha), Strawberry Creek (5 731 ha), McGillivray (11 400 ha), and Kootenay Lake (7 808 ha).

The unanswered question becomes how much burn wood can be dropped into the basket with the beetle wood as the clock ticks. According to Pedersen, the issue is not just a market problem with sending this rush of lumber into the U.S., but whether a quota system will be set up, and whether BC will need to consider its share of the Canadian lumber quota. No one has a ready answer. The best solution seems to be - get the highest valued wood out before time's up.

Race to Harvest

Immediate considerations include: determining the moisture content of the logs, the depth of the burn on the outside, and such fundamentals as species identification. Depending on answers to those questions, a two- to three-year harvesting window exists before escaped moisture causes the wood to dry, check, and lose the ability to yield higher quality lumber and chips.

In the past, trees were felled to gauge an idea of their moisture content. But in 2000, FERIC started research on a car-battery-size moisture gauge with an attached probe that is rugged, rapid, portable, and accurate. Its original intent was to provide the industry with a quick means of determining ideal log moisture content (60-70%) for OSB production. Too much water affected drying time, while not enough water in the log produced inferior grade strands, says FERIC's James Ewart, design engineer.

The technology was developed by E.S.I. Environmental Sensors and is known as Moisture-Point. Its original use was to probe moisture content in soil before FERIC discovered its use for OSB manufacturers. The gauge uses Time Domain Reflectology (TDR), which is essentially sending an electromagnetic signal down a probe. The more moisture, the faster it travels, with the speed corresponding to various moisture levels.

The unit used by FERIC has two long probes that slip into two side-by-side holes in a tree to a depth of 15 cm or six inches. FERIC adapted a drill so that it could bore two holes allowing the probe to seat. As Ewart points out, the technology is simple and fast, with as many as 200 trees sampled in a single day.

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Ewart says FERIC has tried the technology on several fire sites to provide mills with information on how rapidly the burned logs were losing moisture, affecting chip quality. By random area sampling, the technology can provide companies with profiles on the affected fire stands, and thus direct felling efforts into the trees with the most moisture. That limits the stems yielding down-graded byproducts and lumber. As yet, FERIC has the only adapted TDR and drill used for these purposes.

What is that thing?

But equipment operators still face the problems of determining what is behind the layer of black char and soot on the stem. Kineshanko says species identification is harder and logging productivity drops in fire stands, an analysis shared by fire salvage loggers in other parts of Canada (see box on page 40).