The summer of 2021 brought an intense and highly destructive wildfire season, leaving hundreds of thousands of hectares of charred landscape, destroyed homes and heavily damaged infrastructure in its wake. 

For Merritt, an economy that relies heavily on the forest industry, the impact of timber loss could be both extreme and long lasting according to Bruce Rose, Executive VP of the AP Group of Companies which owns and operates Aspen Planers. 

Although the extent of the damage has yet to be fully assessed, estimates place the number of hectares burned at 900,000 hectares or 9,000 square kilometres. 

“The best we can assess right at the moment, out of those 900,000 hectares this year, 500,000 hectares has been in the Kamloops Fire District… that is the area around Aspen and that affects us in our Lillooet operations, our Merritt operations, and others,” said Rose. 

“From what I can tell, they estimate there’s been another 130,000 to 150,000 hectares in the Cariboo region and we get some logs from up there as well, we buy private timber there.” 

This number may increase or decrease depending on the results of the ongoing analysis, which Rose said will likely not happen quickly as nearly every forest professional is out with boots on the ground assessing the damaged areas and taking stock of the timber.

“I always use the phrase: it’s their tree farm, and they’re already working on all sorts of areas mapping, fire severity mapping, doing in a general way a big forest inventory update,” explained Rose. 

“They just got started, and it takes quite a long period of time… I looked at 2018 the largest ever year, and it took the government to publish and outline what the impacts were of those until April of 2019. So, to really have an idea of the short-term, long-term supply on the timber base, how much got burned and summarize it all, it appears to have taken six to eight months.” 

In 2018 more than 1.3 million hectares burned in BC, but of that only 25% was in the timber harvesting land base, where timber harvest is considered acceptable and economically feasible.

“The difficulty is for us to go out and try to figure out really what the timber losses were. How deeply things have been burnt, how hot the fires were, is some of the timber just lightly scarred with fire? Or just on the ground at their roots where some of the fuel was? And what can still be extracted.” 

Depending on the severity of the burn, factors such as how hot the temperature reached as the fire moved through an area, if the fire spread through the canopy, whether flames penetrated the bark or how burned the bark itself is, trees in fire zones may still be harvestable, but there is often a timeframe before harvest loses viability. 

“The recovery value from the burned timber before it deteriorates, in some cases, with things like Douglas Fir for example, you need to get to it and get it out within a year or it just becomes valueless in terms of some of the uses that we would want it for, such as making plywood or making veneer and so forth,” said Rose.  

“So, there are some time constraints. All the licensees at the current time are out on the land base and areas where they operate and already having a look and saying, what can we extract out of these areas? Where it has very little value from a lumber perspective or for the plywood business or the veneer business, is when you get into situations where in the processing or manufacturing of it, you end up producing charcoal or charred parts of the wood.” 

Under different circumstances, wood that may not make the grade for lumber or plywood products can often be sent to pulp mills for processing. However, pulp mills invest a significant amount of money into chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide in order to make their product white and will not accept any waste product that has blackened or with charcoal. 

In this case, the only option to salvage value from the trees is to use them in biomass power generation, a process that takes place at the Merritt Green Energy Plant.

As in any other industry, economics play a leading role in how companies and the provincial government will move ahead with salvage efforts. 

“It’s going to become an issue of how much green and salvageable timber is in a certain area, and how densely affected an area is,” said Rose.  

“You’re not going to go into an area where there’s 200 burned trees to extract ten trees out of it, because you’d go broke just on the cost. That’s the issue here, is how widespread of an area is affected.” 

The cost of processing rises considerably when many trees in a harvest area are damaged, not only because of the reduction in their value as a product, but because harvesting burned timber presents its own added difficulties. 

“The impact on motors and all those types of things because of the charcoal and the removal of bark and cutting into the wood, it’s very messy and very difficult on parts and it takes a lot more maintenance and cleaning,” explained Rose. 

Still up in the air is the question of stumpage rates. Rose and others in the industry agree that unless the government comes up with a way to make harvesting in fire areas more economically attractive, the timber will be left to rot. And without harvest, companies are not obligated to replant which encourages the restoration of not only tree growth, but other plant life and animal habitat. 

“If you’re paying the full stumpage fee, the natural tendency is you’re going to avoid this stuff and you’re going to harvest green timber,” said Rose. 

“Because why would you go harvest something that is economically damaged? And like all licensees we have an Annual Allowable Cut (AAC), and if this is going to be part of your AAC and you have to pay full stumpage, you’re not going to go extract trees that have that less-than-optimal value than you’re going to get.”

“There’s a lot of issues around forest health where relatively high risk and low value, marginal tree stands have actually just been left there because there is no economic incentive or reason to go get them. And then, when a fire starts, they’re unhealthy, they’re dead, they still may be affected by a bug. We have the mountain pine beetle but there’s fir beetle problems, there’s all sorts of other issues. Eventually, trees just get old and die too, that’s just what happens. And if you don’t extract them and there’s no incentive to go extract them, when a fire happens, and fire is always going to happen, they become big and spread very quickly.”