Windstorm’s wrath forces emergency harvest
NASELLE, Pacific County
There is never a good time for 125-mile-an-hour winds to hopscotch across your tree farm and blow down millions of dollars’ worth of timber that’s taken decades to grow.
December was certainly one of the worst times right in the middle of a home-building bust that has idled many sawmills and sent some logging prices skidding to some of the lowest points of the past quarter-century.
“We’ll only get one chance in our lifetime to harvest this ground,” said Arne Wirkkala, whose family has about 1,000 acres of forest damaged by the hurricane-force gusts of December’s storm. “We were looking to put our kids and grandkids through college, and this isn’t the market we would have picked.”
Wirkkala is one of dozens of landowners launching a big and at times dangerous salvage harvest in Southwest Washington.
They are caught in a financial trap. There is a big rush to harvest this wood, before it discolors and loses even more value. But in the months ahead, the salvaged logs risk flooding regional markets, further depressing prices.
Much of the timber lies in a weird patchwork that spreads across some 19,000 acres of Southwest Washington. Within these lands, the wind spared some stands and pummeled others just a few hundred yards away. Some trees are splayed on the ground, root wads wrested from the soil. Others are bent like taut bows. Still more remain upright but with tops that look like they were lopped off by giant garden shears.
This was the worst wind damage since the notorious Columbus Day storm of 1962, which knocked down timber as far inland as Oregon’s Willamette Valley and claimed at least 46 lives. The December storm blew over several days, wreaking most of the damage within a narrow band that lies within 20 miles of the coast.
In this zone, state officials estimate 600 million to 800 million board feet of public and private timber enough wood to build more than 20,000 homes was damaged.
The bulk of the damage is on state lands and corporate holdings owned by Weyerhaeuser and other large forest companies. The storm also struck many of the hundreds of family-owned tree farms, whose tracts range from a few backyard acres to more than 1,000 acres.
Safety concerns
Most of the salvage harvest will be mechanized. Rather than tramping through the woods, loggers will sit inside a cab, operating automated saws that bite through fir, spruce, hemlock and alder trees and pare them into lengths. Their windshields are made of bulletproof glass to protect them against falling limbs.
Tags: amp, rta, soil, weyerhaeuser0
