Some Island Timberlands' stakeholders are adding pressure to the forestry company over the harvesting of old growth within Port Alberni's watershed.

As logging continues in McLaughlin Ridge near Cathedral Grove, the B.C. Teachers Federation voted to ask Island Timberlands to sell the forestry land it owns in the steeply sloped area. The motion passed Jan. 31 at a BCTF assembly of district representatives, urging the forestry company to sell McLaughlin Ridge to “an organization(s) that will conserve and preserve forest lands.”

The old growth forest is within the China Creek watershed, the drinking water source for more than 20,000 people in Port Alberni and Beaver Creek. Ken Zydyk, president of the Alberni Teachers Union, said the request for Island Timberlands to divest the land was first approved by public educators in Port Alberni.

“There are many teachers concerned about the current practices of Island Timberlands,” he said.

Local teachers wonder if the harvesting in McLaughlin Ridge ensures “the protection of our watershed so that Port Alberni can continue to have high quality, clean water,” added Zydyk.

The Jan. 31 motion also asks Island Timberlands to gain certification from the Forest Stewardship Council, an international system that promotes “strict environmental and social standards,” according to the council's website.

Canadian members of the Forest Stewardship Council include Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, the National Aboriginal Forestry Association and B.C.-based Brinkman and Associates Reforestation. The teachers' request now goes to the B.C. Investment Management Corporation, a major Island Timberlands shareholder. The BCIMC invests pensions for teachers and other public sector employees around the province.

“Teachers are uncomfortable that we put some of our salary towards our pension, it's like a savings account that we access later,” Zydyk said, adding that the concern was if teachers' funds are “being used in a socially responsible way.”

The forestry company has met with municipal officials on almost a monthly basis since city council voted last August to join a lobbying effort to halt harvesting in McLaughlin Ridge.

This push is being led by the Watershed Forest Alliance, a local environmental group that fears the forestry activity is unsustainable, harming McLaughlin Ridge's wildlife and compromising Port Alberni's source of drinking water.

A letter from Island Timberlands to the city in August 2014 said the company's construction of logging roads, harvesting and replanting is executed with a focus on water quality. The company stated lots are usually replanted within nine months of harvesting.

The administrative body that enforces provincial law on private forestry companies has deemed Island Timberlands to be acting responsibly. The Private Managed Land Council has investigated the company's activities in the China Creek Watershed.

“Their report concluded that our practices are above average for coastal operations,” wrote Morgan Kennah, IT's community affairs manager, in the letter to the city. “The study noted that although harvesting activity has increased in the area in the past decade, the hydrological capacity for the watershed to balance this harvesting with current forest cover and regenerating forests is below the threshold for best management in watersheds.”

Turbidity – or water cloudiness – has been an issue raised in the push to halt logging in the watershed. Turbidity can interfere with municipal water treatment systems, a concern that led Island Health to issue boil water advisories for Nanaimo and the Comox Valley after heavy rain in December. An advisory was not given for the Alberni Valley, as turbidity levels fell within the province's standard for healthy drinking water.

Island Timberlands' letter to the city noted that selling McLaughlin Ridge would be costly and bring no guarantee that water quality will improve.

“Acquiring land in the watershed in an attempt to impact seasonal turbidity will certainly be expensive, and is highly unlikely to eliminate the need for filtration,” wrote Kennah.

Meetings between the Watershed Forest Alliance, city officials and the B.C. Ministry of Forests are expected to continue.

On the agenda for Tuesday's council meeting, a motion proposed to form the Alberni Valley Watershed Management Committee to oversee forestry and drinking water issues.

Read more: https://www.avtimes.net/news/local-news/company-pressured-to-halt-harvesting-of-old-growth-within-city-s-watershed-1.1759064

Jane Morden and the Watershed Forest Alliance (WFA) have been fighting against logging at McLaughlin Ridge for close to half a decade now, but with city council’s unanimous decision on Monday night to support their efforts they may be one step closer to a solution.

Sarah Thomas, a volunteer with the WFA, presented the group’s concerns to city council and called on the city to support the WFA’s efforts to pause the logging at McLaughlin Ridge and have a conversation with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations as well as landowners Island Timberlands.

The company owns McLaughlin Ridge and is legally permitted to log the old growth trees located there. The area represents a few hundred hectares of the 250,000 ha that Island Timberlands owns.

According to Thomas, the Mclaughlin Ridge old growth lands were identified by the province as areas that should be protected. However by 2004, the lands were removed from the Tree Farm Licence (TFL) and while promises were made to come to some agreement about how the lands would be protected, this never happened.

McLaughlin Ridge, which is about an hour southeast of Port Alberni, is home to a couple of hundred hectares of old growth Douglas Fir as well as the China Creek Watershed, the city’s main water source. Currently, the watershed meets Island Health’s 4-3-2-1-0 water requirements but the concern is that if the old growth is cut down, that might not be the case anymore.

“It’s important to protect [the China Creek Watershed] because you can always treat water but this costs a lot of money and it’s never as good as the original. We would like to make sure that nothing really bad happens to that water,” said Edna Cox of the Save Our Valley Alliance, a public education group.

“It’s designated a community watershed so we’re asked to stay out of the area and yet logging continues,” said Thomas at city council.

While the city does have other, secondary sources of water in Bainbridge Lake and Lizard Lake, China Creek is the best water source that Port Alberni has due to the filtration that the old growth up McLaughlin Ridge provides.

“The water comes down very, very slowly and it’s really well filtered [by the old growth]. If it comes of a bare slope or washes a lot of silt down then it’s not such high quality water,” said Cox.

If a lot of silt is washed down, the amount of sediments in the water increase, as does the turbidity.

“When there’s turbidity there’s a problem because you can’t even treat the water, it doesn’t help,” Cox said.

The old growth also helps keep the city’s water supply steady throughout the year. With the old growth there, the snowpack up on the ridge melts a little slower.

“The forest acts as a sponge so you don’t have all the water coming down in the spring melt and then no water in the summer.

“We’ve had low water conditions now for over a year; we didn’t have much of a snowpack last year either,” said Jane Armstrong, also from the WFA.

Armstrong is not sure what the future holds for Port Alberni’s water supply, but she thinks that with climate change happening that drought conditions will stick around and that instead of rain throughout the year, the watershed will be filled up by occasional huge downpours.

[“If this happens] the forest is a natural solution for helping to control the flow of water,” Armstrong said.

Clearcutting also has another, more immediate danger; landslides. In 2006, clearcuts in the Beauforts, followed by a large amount of precipitation, were thought to have caused landslides that affected Beaver Creek’s water and brought gravel in debris into people’s homes.

There’s a chance that clearcutting on McLaughlin Ridge could lead to the same.

While Island Timberlands is required to replant trees that they cut down—and states that they typically do so within nine months —the high elevation of McLaughlin Ridge means that it will be generations until those replacement trees are big enough to serve any purpose, says Morden.

“This area is at a higher elevation, we’re talking about a thousand metres up, so it’s not going to grow back at a fast rate. Up there, you can have a 20-year-old tree that’s not anywhere much above your waist, said Morden, “and when the roots start to decompose from the huge [old growth trees,] then your chances of landslides are going to increase.”

In an e-mailed statement, Morgan Kennah, Manager of Sustainable Timberlands and Community Affairs for Island Timberlands, said that they “have and continue to work cooperatively with the city to ensure water quality is maintained in China Creek. In cooperation with the Ministry of Environment, we have installed a continuous water quality monitoring station in the watershed to ensure we meet the applicable water quality objectives.”

However, Cox doesn’t think that this is good enough because while “drinking water is protected [that] protection will take precedence when there’s an imminent threat, when it’s basically too late.”

According to Coun. Cindy Solda, the issue has been brought up at the Association of Island and Coastal Communities (AVICC), the Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM) and the Alberni-Clayquot Regional District (ACRD) and that a main goal of these government-led bodies is to change the way private land is regulated.

“One main goal is to get private land and Crown to be the same… we want to have more say,” Solda said.

“[Water] is a human right, we really need to have water,” said Coun. Wendy Kerr, “the forest companies have to know that they don’t own that water, they’re only renting the space, nobody owns this planet but we need to start taking care of it now.”

With that, Kerr raised motions to give city council’s support to the WFA and support the organization’s request to pause the logging at McLaughlin Ridge as well as to request a meeting between council, the WFA, Island Timberlands and the provincial forestry ministry.

City council carried the motion to applause from meeting attendees.

Quick facts:

◆ The first cut done at McLaughlin Ridge was four to five years ago, with a large cut occurring in 2011. Jane Morden of Watershed Forest Alliance says 50 per cent of the old growth remains.

◆ Port Alberni gets its water from the China Creek Watershed, located an hour southeast of the city. McLaughlin Ridge is located at the northern edge of the watershed boundary.

◆ There are two water intake sources within the China Creek Watershed: a creek intake off of China Creek at the western edge of the watershed and a lake intake off of Bainbridge Lake, located slightly northwest of the watershed boundary.

◆ The city primarily uses the creek intake due to its marginally higher water quality. However, if anything were to happen to the creek intake water quality, the city could use the lake intake.

Those two water intakes represent the redundancy in the city’s water supply, which means that it is unlikely that the two sources would both be unusable at the same time, city engineer Guy Cicon said.

◆ Port Alberni’s water is treated with chlorine before being stored in reservoirs. The city is currently in phase one of upgrading their water facilities by adding UV disinfection at a cost of $4 million. There is also the possibility of later adding a filtration system at an additional $3 million.

Read more: https://www.albernivalleynews.com/news/logging-mclaughlin-ridge-watershed-advocates-say-logging-threatens-citys-water-source/

The Council of Canadians, Pulp, Paper, and Woodworkers of Canada (PPWC) union and various environmental organizations have signed a joint statement calling on Island Timberlands to halt logging the endangered old-growth forests of McLaughlin Ridge near Port Alberni, BC. They asked the BC Liberal government show leadership and ensure the forest’s protection.

“The company and the BC government really need to heed the call of so many diverse organizations, otherwise the controversy will only continue to grow,” said Jane Morden from the Port Alberni Watershed-Forest Alliance, which is spearheading the campaign to protect old-growth forests around the region, including McLaughlin Ridge.

Island Timberland owns over 258,000 hectares of private forest lands in BC. Environmental advocates have criticized the company for logging Douglas fir forests and endangered Queen Charlotte goshawk habitat at McLaughlin Ridge.

McLaughlin Ridge is part of 78,000 hectares of land that were removed from Tree Farm Licence (TFL) 44 on Vancouver Island in 2004, which exempted the area from the environmental policies and/or regulations designed to protect species at risk, old-growth forests, ungulate winter ranges, and riparian areas.

“By all measures, McLaughlin Ridge is of the highest conservation priority – as ungulate winter range, for species at risk, for scarce old-growth Douglas-fir groves, and as part of Port Alberni’s drinking watershed,” said Ancient Forest Alliance photographer and campaigner TJ Watt in a news release.

Ancient Forest Alliance executive director Ken Wu said Island Timberlands was “charging forward to log their most contentious, environmentally significant old-growth forests and socially-valued lands” despite strong opposition to the project.

He said “time is short and options for McLaughlin Ridge will run out soon if the corporation continues to cut out the heart of its ancient forest.”

Read more: https://www.vancouverobserver.com/news/environmental-and-labour-organizations-call-island-timberlands-stop-logging-old-growth-forest