The 2017 wildfire year was a devastating one for British Columbia. Although 2018 has ultimately turned out to be even worse, it is the results of the 2017 fires that are currently starting to impact BC's tree planting industry.
In 2017, approximately 1.2 million hectares burned. The majority of the ground that burned did so in July and August. Although projects began to be tendered in September and October of 2017, for planting projects that would take place in the spring/summer of 2018, those projects generally did not address ground that was burned in 2017. Certainly, a few contractors saw some burned ground, but that was only because ground that had already been prescribed for 2018 planting happened to burn. The projects were not yet intended to target the 2017 devastation in a general sense.
Fast forward to this year, and there are significant projects coming down the pipeline right now which will cover ground burned in 2017. In some cases, foresters are re-planting blocks that were planted in 2016 and 2017, as those are often the easiest to start with (for a number of reasons that I won't list here). An example of a contract such as this can be found in BCTS Williams Lake district. Many of the blocks in the northern part of that region (south of the Clisbako River, up the 4600 road) are ones that my camp originally planted in 2016. For the most part, that series of blocks burned completely, and not a tree survived. Nor did the duff and upper organic layers of the soil.
In other cases, foresters are targeting blocks that have become fairly well established, and are close to their free growing date (ie. around twenty years old). In these blocks, the plantations have reached heights of twelve to twenty feet or greater, and were becoming very healthy stands until the fire hit them. An example of a contract such as this would be either of the pair of MOF Kamloops projects up the Scottie Creek FSR (north of Cache Creek), and up the Battle FSR (north of Big Sky). Incidentally, Evergreen is planting one of those MOF contracts, and A&G Reforestation is planting the other.
The contracts that I've mentioned above are probably just the very tip of the iceberg with respect to what's coming later this fall, and what we'll be seeing for the next several years. As if the 2017 fire wasn't bad enough (with some government estimates suggesting that the industry would have to plant 200,000 hectares over the next decade just to mitigate 2017 damage), this year turned out to be another record-breaking year, which is simply going to make matters far worse for the next several years. To be honest, I don't think BC has the capacity to ever repair all of the wildfire damage from last year and this year, but that's another story which needs to consider nursery capacities, labour supply/demand shortfalls, and other issues.
The reason that I'm bringing all of this up is due to the safety issues relating to fire-damaged stands. There exists a danger to any workers within such stands, due to unstable burned trees (danger trees). Now to be perfectly clear (in case my mother reads this), I think there are more serious dangers out there. I believe that the risk to any tree planter of sustaining serious injuries or a fatality is many times more likely to be the result of a vehicular incident, not having a tree fall on you. But having said that, it doesn't mean that we should disregard the issue of danger trees in wildfire stands. We are not completely free of risk.
In my mind, the problem with these stands lays in determining how to assess the danger trees within the stands. Within BC, there is a specific certification that forestry workers can obtain, called the Danger Tree Assessor certification. To obtain this certification, the participant must attend a two-day training course and pass both a written exam and a field exam. I've received this certification twice (the certificate expires after four years), and I found that it was a fairly comprehensive course. You have to be quite intelligent and be paying close attention in order to pass the course. In other words, it's not a superficial course. I should also point out that there are different varieties of Danger Tree Assessor certification, aimed at either forest harvesting and silviculture, wildland fire safety, or parks and recreation personnel.
When a certified Danger Tree Assessor enters a stand to assess problems within the stand, there are going to be a lot of questions about how dangerous a given tree must be in order to be considered "dangerous." Some trees will be found to be unquestionably of no significant risk to workers in the stand. Other trees will be found to pose definite problems, and will have to be addressed through methods such as flagging off a no-work-zone, or having a professional faller come into to drop the tree. Trees in either of those categories are not a problem, in my mind, because their status is clear. However, there may be many other trees within the same stand that fall into the "grey zone" between those two extremes. Trying to decide if those trees are dangerous enough to require further mitigation is the issue that many people will be trying to grapple with.
On the one hand, looking at things from the point-of-view of a planting contractor, the preferred situation would be to be told that most of the trees are not dangerous. If the trees are considered to be dangerous and have to be dropped, two problems are created: Fallers need to be hired to come into the stand with chain saws, to fall all of the problem trees. Planters then have a harder time planting the stand, because they have to crawl across all the dropped trees (and there may be additional eye-poke hazards). This slows them down and reduces their earnings. Both of these problems ultimately turn out to be expensive for a planting contractor. Of course, there are also problems if the trees are not dropped. What happens if one actually falls over and injuries a worker while the planting is taking place? The odds may be very low, but it's not a negligible risk.
Looking at the situation from a different point of view, one wonders if cutting down hundreds of thousands of potentially dangerous burned mature trees could pose a safety risk to the fallers. Of course it would! It would be terrible to ask a faller to go into a stand to cut thousands of burned trees, and then to have the faller be injured or killed because a falling tree acted unexpectedly and caused a crush injury.
My understanding of the situation is that the abiding principle to follow is that of "imminent danger." Tree planting is considered to be a low "level of disturbance" (LOD-1) activity in terms of danger tree assessment criteria. This would be opposed to a high LOD activity such as running machines through the stand for harvesting. With a low LOD, mitigation efforts are not required to be as strict.
For planting, it may be possible to implement standard working protocols for the stand that depend on external measurement criteria. For example, it may be possible for workers to plant within the stand as long as the wind does not reach a speed equal to or greater than 40 km/hr. If the wind speed does get that high, then workers would be required to cease work and evacuate the stand. I should point out to casual readers that if this seems like a lot of wind, these wildfire stands don't have leaves or needles on the trees anymore (and in many cases, even the branches have burned off), therefore there is less surface area on each tree to catch the wind. So in other words, it takes a pretty strong wind to really move these burned stick trees.
The principle of imminent danger is intended to avoid cutting too many trees unnecessarily, and therefore reducing the exposure to risk of the workers who are falling the "danger trees." Ultimately, this means that there is a balance between the risk of a tree falling spontaneously on a planter, versus the risk that the same tree falls on a certified faller during the process of cutting the tree down.
I should point out that the concept of imminent danger may apply to most wildfire stands, but this doesn't mean the same approach can be taken with dealing with danger trees around a temporary planting camp. In that situation, the exposure is much longer (a period of perhaps weeks under potentially dangerous trees, rather than minutes) and there is more chance during this time period of adverse external events occurring without prior warning (ie. a wind storm that arises in the middle of the night). The "imminent danger" protocol would therefore not be useful for saying that it's ok for planters to set tents up under potential danger trees. And by the way, planters should have the common sense not to set tents up under ANY trees that look like they could blown down in a windstorm, regardless of whether or not there was wildfire damage to the tree. However, common sense can sometimes be anything but common in a planting camp.
To directly quote an associate with whom I conversed about this topic, "It is incumbent on the Clients to make it clear at the viewings what the standards are for assessment, to live up to their due diligence obligation to make bidders aware of the hazards involved in the work." Of course, in my experience at viewing meetings, the level of due diligence demonstrated by some clients is highly variable. Some firms are very specific about this topic. For example, Forsite Forestry Consultants tend to be quite clear about what the hazards are, and what their expectations are pertaining to how the site should be dealt with. Other clients offer less clarity.
Incidentally, I've heard rumours that in some areas, DTA personnel
may be required to wear tracking devices that will show their trails
through the block, to ensure that the block was checked thoroughly, and
that WorkSafe will then come in to do a follow-up inspection of what was
assessed and/or cut. I'm looking forward to learning more about this
new practice.
My personal advice is that if a bidder is not satisfied with the clarity of the information that they have received, they should ask the client specific questions, in writing. Clear guidance is an important part of the process of due diligence.
My final concern is that some bidders may try to win contracts by "cutting corners" when it comes to stand assessment and, even more particularly, with mitigation of potential dangers. It would be a shame if such a contractor won a job someday because they didn't budget for proper assessment and treatment of potential danger trees, and a worker was subsequently injured or killed by a falling tree. In my mind, that would make the both the contractor AND the client complicit in responsibility for the accident.
It would be easy to come up with a solution to this problem, and to level the field for planting contractors: the client should deal with the stand assessment and mitigation separately, rather than passing the responsibility on to the planting contractor. In a low-bid system, it simply doesn't make sense for contracts to be set up this way. If clients ensured that a separate firm took care of DTA assessment and danger tree mitigation from a separate funding source, there would be no risk of cost-cutting contractors gaining a competitive advantage to the detriment of the long-term safety of their employees.
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Here's a link to a WorkSafeBC publication about Danger Tree Management:
http://www.replant.ca/docs/Danger_Tree_Management_Worksafe.pdf
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