A year after an urgent bill allowed native timber recovery on the West Coast, a fraction of the available timber has been removed and time is already running out. Source: Stuff NZ
In a patch of native forest near Lake Brunner, a high-pitched drone leads to two men milling native timber.
Derek Johnson and Phil Coll are one of seven teams permitted to recover storm damaged timber from conservation land on the Coast and the only one milling the timber on site.
Johnson operates a portable sawmill, running it back and forth the length of a rimu log, cutting timber for floorboards and furniture. He passes milled planks to Coll for stacking until it is ready to be helicoptered out in 200-kilogram bundles.
The pair has been working part-time in the forest on the southwest shore of Lake Brunner since December. It’s a year since an urgent bill was passed to allow five years of timber recovery, but time is already running out – due to borer – and only a fraction of the available timber has been removed.
This month they found their first borer carving a tunnel through high-value timber, which rendered that section worthless. Now the race is against time to get as much timber out as they can before rot and borer take over.
Derek Johnson saws rimu with a portable mill near Lake Brunner. “Milling it’s actually quite straight forward,” he says.
On April 17, 2014 the West Coast was hit by the tail of Cyclone Ita. Along with damage to buildings, some 200,000 hectares of native forest on the Coast was damaged by the storm.
Two months later, then-Conservation Minister Nick Smith proposed legislation that would allow the one-time salvage of some of the damaged timber.
It was in sharp contrast to existing law, which banned logging of native timber on conservation land since the early 2000s.
A logging site near Brunner, six months after timber was removed. Critics say nutrients that would have been composted in situ are now gone.
At the time, the West Coast was at the storm’s eye of a debate between those who wanted to conserve the forests and those who believed logging could be done sustainably.
But the teams working on the ground suspect there will only be about another six months before the wood rots to a point they cannot make a reasonable return on it.
Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) senior advisor Alan Tinnelly was seconded to the Department of Conservation (DOC) to lend his forestry expertise to the timber recovery. It took until late October for the first forester to get going.
For an industry that had been out of the game for 15 years, it was a steep curve for some operators. Of 14 initial applicants, only seven were approved.
Johnson and Coll are the only team using a portable mill on site. Another five crews are lifting logs out by helicopter and one team in Karamea is about to start recovering red beech by roadside winch. It is only possible because that section of forest was completely flattened in the storm.
Johnson and Coll have to saw the logs off massive root plates, winch them onto a flat section of ground and set-up on the mill. Once in place it only takes four or five hours to mill the log.
“That’s the easy bit,” Johnson says. “The hard bit is the cutting the tree into saw log lengths and positioning each log, that’s all the work. Milling it’s actually quite straight forward. They’re the enjoyable days.”
Before the storm, Johnson was cutting small amounts of timber part-time. “But I probably hadn’t cut any native for five years before this because it’s just so hard to come across.”
Although there was plenty of paperwork to get approved, “we just thought it was too good an opportunity,” he says.
“Unless this legislation does extend, you’ll never see timber like this again I don’t think. So it’s been quite a unique sort of thing, it’s been good to be part of it.”
Johnson and Coll are working in a 100-hectare area of forest. An equivalent area, with the same amount of windfall, was set aside as reserve. Within the work area only half the rimu can be taken, and for matai it is even less.
“This matai, we can only take 30%. So for every tree we mill we’ve got to leave two, and that’s in our work area not including the offset area.”
Within the work area they identify clusters or two or three suitable trees and set-up base for two or three weeks.
“It’s pretty labour intensive, nothing happens fast, but that’s the way it is, you’ve just got to take your time.”
Then the timber is flown out by helicopter and the mill lifted out to the next cluster.
Johnson says people hear logging and assume clearfell, but even the sites they were working in six months ago already have ferns and other regrowth cropping up.
“It was always ‘how long is this wood going to last?’ It wouldn’t be such a big deal if it was a cheaper way of extracting it, but there’s not so you can’t use that as an excuse. That’s the way it is, it has to be done this way or heli-logged.”
Tinnelly says as the timber deteriorated, millers could move into the forest and take out only the profitable heartwood.
“December is going to be a teller. [With] some of this stuff, there might be only some of the heart available,” says the DOC man.
“Into next summer … we may have to look at another system of payment for stumpage … because we’re not interested in these guys going to the wall.”
MPI estimated about 140,000 cubic metres of timber could be extracted, but it looks like only 7000 to 10,000 cubic metres will actually be recovered.
So far, 7300 cubic metres has been approved for removal but only 2800 has been taken and Tinnelly said only 5000-6000 could wind up being taken.
The rest was proving to be too difficult or dangerous to remove. Some is on steep slopes, for instance.
Nine additional sites had been approved, which another 2000 to 5000 cubic metres of timber available.
Despite smaller amounts being removed than originally discussed, Green Party conservation spokeswoman Eugenie Sage says that is more than should have been allowed. Passing the bill was part of a “continued attack by the National government on the protection of nature for its own sake”.
“It was a fundamental change in allowing conservation land to be logged. It continues to be a fundamental attack on the department’s statutory responsibility to preserve and protect nature.”
Several groups, including Forest and Bird, raised concerns that allowing the logging would affect the natural decomposition processes in the forests.
Regardless of how careful the loggers were in limiting damage, Sage says they were fundamentally changing the ecology of the forests they removed timber from.
“The nutrients that would have been recycled are now removed … so it is changing the forest system and all of the life that the decomposing trees would have sustained.”
No-one’s expecting another storm event like Cyclone Ita to cause the same level of damage, but natural tree death or small scale disturbance occurs far more regularly. It is not clear yet whether the bill will set a precedent for future events. Sage worries it will.
The foresters are hoping they can use this event to prove they can take some timber sustainably.
Reefton-based New Zealand Sustainable Forest Products has removed two-thirds of the timber recovered to date. Production manager Jon Dronfield was working for Timberlands West Coast when indigenous timber logging was stopped.
“The West Coast was a different place then and since they shut that down and the rimu’s gone off the market in any volumes, we’ve probably lost 60% of our furniture capacity. It’s cheaper to import.”
Though rimu had a “specific reference point” for New Zealanders, there was less demand because it had been off the market in great quantities for 10 years.
Up against $65 million of imported hardwood timber a year, Dronfield says the foresters on the Coast aren’t even competing against each other.
“We’re just trying to get enough scale in the [native timber] so that people can start using rimu again.”
Kumara-based miller Michael McGrath extracts wood from a nearby reserve and processes it at his Kumara sawmill.
Like Johnson, McGrath sold his timber as he went. He says there were “scare tactics” when the bill was proposed, that there would be no market.
“That’s not true, there’s plenty of markets for it. There’s no issues with selling it,” McGrath says. “I don’t think anyone’s sitting on any timber.
“You’re not cutting it and stockpiling it. As quick as we can cut, it’s going out the gate.”
The numbers*:
– 2800 cubic metres removed to date
– 7300 cubic metres approved for removal from 13 sites
– Estimated available timber: 105,000 cubic metres of rimu, 36,000 cubic metres of beech
– Overall estimated total recovered by project end: 7000 to 10,000 cubic metres
– Fourteen initial applicants, seven approved operators
– Stumpage fees per cubic metre are paid to DOC for a conservation fund: $NZ250 for rimu and $NZ60 for beech
*Source: Ministry for Primary Industries
