The Sunshine Coast Community Forest will take a financial blow as a result of the recent forest fire activity near Sechelt, although the exact cost won’t be known for some time.
“We don’t have real numbers on that, just sort of a sense of warning that it’s going to impact the third and fourth quarters of this year,” said Sechelt Mayor Bruce Milne at the Aug. 5 regular council meeting.
“It’s really undetermined,” Milne said. “There was some of our licence area that was part of the fire zone, and so that will have an impact. I personally can’t tell you how that works out in terms of our obligations to salvage and replant, but I think there will be some costs coming out of the fire simply because we’re the licence holder.”
The extremely dry weather and need to conserve water has also halted all logging activity in the community forest for now, which will have an added financial impact in the months to come.
A letter to council from Glen Bonderud, chair and president of Sechelt Community Projects Inc., which manages the Sunshine Coast Community Forest, said councillors could expect a “tough second half of 2015.”
“The community forest tenure area did receive some significant damage in the northeast corner of our Halfmoon Bay chart area,” Bonderud said in his letter to council.
“A rough estimate is approximately 150 hectares that has been impacted. The damage ranged from young plantations up to mature timber being affected.”
Bonderud said operations manager Dave Lasser would arrange an assessment of the forest area with the Ministry of Forests as soon as possible to better understand the total damage and “what remedial action we can take on harvesting the damaged trees and replanting” in the affected areas.
“The assessment will be done as soon as it is safe to enter the fire area; however, we may be waiting for some significant rain before any action can be taken,” Bonderud said.
He stressed that no one should try to enter the area “to try to take a look” at the damage because the forest is still unsafe.
“Fire can weaken or kill tree root structure, and even where it appears trees are green and healthy, the unseen damage to the root system can render the trees unsound,” Bonderud said.
