A Gisborne forestry company says it has lost hundreds of hectares of trees worth tens of millions of dollars due to Cyclone Gabrielle.
Neil Woods, chief executive of Aratu Forests, said the company had been severely impacted by Cyclone Gabrielle with landslides taking out strips of 10-to-20 year old trees, roots and all.
Aratu Forests manages about 27,000 hectares of pine plantations across about 35,000 hectares of land. It has one of the largest forestry estates in Gisborne.
Woods said most of what the company has lost and ended up in waterways isn’t slash, or forestry waste, but full trees.
“We would have thought those trees would have been stabilising the sites, and typically it does, so we are doing a lot of work on why those ages [of trees], was it soil or sickness, or did it just happen?”
Woods said it had native trees in the Aratu Estate and they have also slid down hillsides into rivers.
“This is the vast majority of the material that we see in mobilising onto beaches and properties. There is some form of sawn-off material, but the vast majority is actually these other trees that have come out, the younger trees.”
Neil said the firm was working to understand why this had occurred but it was still difficult to access sites.
It had satellite images from after Cyclone Hale and new images post Cyclone Gabrille to compare, he said, and had done some aerial flights over the estate.
“The imagery of that is coming through now and we're starting to analyse it. In one catchment we've got 35 hectares of the 250 hectares in the catchment has been affected. So that's the scale, it's about 15% or something else that age class [of trees] has gone … It's just too hard and dangerous, frankly, to get in there and wander, and we are using drones as well.”
Aratu would need to decide whether to clear entire hillsides where there were strips of damage, or what to do with areas in a catchment where trees are gone.
He said the business wouldn’t feel an immediate economic impact but there would be a “hole” in about 15 years time when those lost trees should have been harvested.
Woods said from here the industry had to figure out what it can grow on this land, and what the best use of it is.
“Some trees shouldn't have been planted where they are. Some probably shouldn't be harvested, and once harvested some shouldn't be put back in pine and maybe not a native either, but some other vegetation used.”
Nash gets nosy
The forestry industry is under intense pressure for slash, or left over tree waste, being washed onto beaches and taking out bridges in heavy rainfall. There have been repeated examples in Gisborne where there is heavy forestry activity.
Despite initially rebuffing attempts to put the industry under scrutiny, Forestry Minister Stuart Nash succumbed to public pressure and announced a ministerial enquiry into land use, woody debris and sediment-related damage in Tairāwhiti/Gisborne and Wairoa.
A three-person panel including former National Party government minister Hon Hekia Parata will make recommendations to improve land use including changes to practices and regulation at central and local government levels, Nash said in a statement.
New Zealand Institute of Forestry president James Treadwell said he is “fully up” for a review of forestry practices but he was concerned the focus was on finding a scapegoat for what has been a “massive massive event”.
He said some foresters had lost 15-to-20 hectares of trees and people don’t understand the extent of the damage.
“I think they’re going to be shocked when they see some of the images from inland.”
Treadwell said the focus of the inquiry shouldn’t be narrowed to forestry and needed to be longer than the two months scheduled.
“We need to be looking at all land use, and it will be different from region to region. Obviously here we are talking about the East Coast and Hawke’s Bay. Where should we have forestry? What practices need to change? Where should we have farming? Which practices need to change? Where do we need to have natives? How do we manage that later?”
Treadwell said its easy to say its logging material coming down, but in some areas it doesn’t matter what is planted - it’s coming down anyway.
“We’ve got pictures of 19-20 year old trees that have disappeared. If there’s highly erodible soils and we’re going to have more of these events, how do we protect the downstream effects? There are some hard decisions to make, and actually maybe we don’t rebuild in these areas and maybe we can change some farming and forestry practices, and there might be other areas where we take the risk. I don’t think we’re going to get the serious discussion we need to have."
45 Comments
The law provides the power to Councils to halt any activity that has unacceptable environmental outcomes. If this situation does not qualify, then I don't know what does. They need to do this ASAP and only tentatively allow it to recommence in proven safe locations with proven safe methods.
When you are in a hole stop digging immediately.
Chaosinfesh
I agree with you.
From what I have seen in video and photographs, they are not full trees coming down the rivers nor washed up on the beaches. It appears predominately slash - a dominance of cut second-rate logs and trimmings.
I suggest one does a Google Image search on "Uawa beach slash" as an example. I can't find any evidence of fresh branches with greenery, nor fresh logs. The slash is predominately - if not all - bleached older logs consistent with having been discarded in forestry operations some time ago.
I have no problem that some forest has been lost in slips. However it is not rocket science that over time discarded slash will dry and therefore become very light and buoyant so easily washed down rivers.
I also accept that no doubt some farming operations have contributed to the issue with poor management of cut trees - but this will be fairly minor compared to forestry.
We have a problem if Mr Woods typically represents the forestry industry as it appears that he is not prepared to step up and take a greater degree of ownership of the issue.
Until these floods, slash is not a term I had come across. My thoughts are it is waste wood. Before councils started putting restrictions in around log fires and pushing heat pumps, would this waste wood not have found its way through to consumers as firewood. What I am getting at is another unintended consequence of global warming green policies.
I thought the same, an afternoon at the beach with chain saw etc, but pine is never a great burning wood, its too fast. Prefer old gums Luckily my house was built back when they allowed large door wood burners. I have three gums which will be 1-2 years worth to deal to already
Driftwood...yikes.
Wood saturated in sea salt can release an excess of chemicals that you won't find in any significant levels in regular seasoned firewood. When you're sitting around a driftwood bonfire you'll be inhaling a toxic chemical known as dioxin. Burning the absorbed salt releases sodium and chlorine ions which form dioxins that are carcinogenic
Yep, that and they've added extra airflow and firebricks, double insulated the walls and made it so all the air must do a zig-zag to heat the top plate and eminate more heat. You can still simply get an angle grinder and grind off the little welded piece of metal that they put on to stop the damper from going full low, but then if there was a fire your insurance company would check that quicksmart.
This is not climate change related.
As far as climate change is concerned wood-burning is almost net zero footprint. Far superior to burning coal at Huntly to power heat pumps.
This is an air quality health policy, due to the smoke getting trapped above places like Christchurch and Hamilton. In places with more airflow like Auckland or Wellington the negatives are almost non-existent.
Unfortunately we live in NZ and are governed poorly so blanket conditions are imposed nationwide.
Such a tiresome ignorant attitude - its the greenies blah blah.
This is not just about slash. Its about the management of hill country. Burning slash may reduce the logs, it wont stop the slips, mud, silt topsoil i.e our lands being striped of productivity and clogging our rivers, estuary, sea beds.. and of course lowland farms, vineyards and homes.
The warnings have been out there for decades...but ignored.
... blocking wood burning isn't just about green policies, is about human health. Every year when the weather starts getting cold and people light their fires, I watch the AQI online. My area of Canterbury shoots up to dismal scores you would expect from the Eastern China seaboard.
couple of years ago there was a chap locally who worked on contracts for forestry companies to get rid of their slash. For $300 you could get a nine ton load of fresh(ish) slash dropped at your place to cut up for firewood. It was a great deal if you were prepared to put in the effort to cut up your own firewood. He told me he made more money that way than delivering it to pulp mills, which is essentially where it generally gets sent to by most forestry companies. It would be great if more companies would do it. The firewood merchants are usually ripoffs.
Looks like the same thing resulted from flooding back in 1948 - check out the state of the beaches then. Be interesting to do a comparison of forestry activities then compared to now...
1948 flood – East Coast region – Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
Fortunately soon all the land will be covered in trees that don't get cut down, because farming carbon credits for offshore investors is far more profitable than cutting down logs and exporting them to China. Slash problem solved. Full trees sliding down the hillside is not a problem because its literally what the Labour Govt has financially incentivised.
"New Zealand Institute of Forestry president James Treadwell.....I don’t think we’re going to get the serious discussion we need to have."
Justifiable cynicism.
But if the debate does happen this might be a useful catalyst to add more diversity to NZ forests, 90% of which is still pine: About the forestry sector | Forestry Careers
Tasmanian Blackwood, for example, has a good rep for controlling erosion. Fixes nitrogen, it suckers, coppices when cut from the stump (so the roots are still holding the ground after harvest as the new stem forms), tends to sprout new stems from the roots if the ground does slip, nice furniture and sarking timber, good cool season fodder for birds and bees, native trees tend to flourish under it (rather than being dominated out under pine). Rotation period is 35 years - OK, 7 longer than pine, but not an age.
What a lot of BS
Stop exporting logs until this industry tidies up it act.
This sending of logs out whole to China has killed the NZ timber industry as well as the roads.
Turn the tap off on whole logs export and let the local industry have a fare go as well as keeping the cost of building down.
TVNZ Breakfast just had a segment on showing the exact kind of damage described above - but in the central plateau/Turangi area. Hectares and hectares of trees wiped out. Looks like a post forest fire landscape - but it was of course just the force of the wind stripping the trees bare and/or just snapping them off near ground height.
Never seen anything to compare it to, other than driving through an area after a devastating a forest fire.
Here's the news item clip;
It's important to remember the geology of many areas along the North Island east coast. Much of it is soft, sedimentary rocks types that are geologically young. Coupled with this is earthquake activity that will have fracturing effects on those underlying rock structures. This results in land slumping that is very deep seated, well beyond the rooting depth of any tree. Trees do de-water this land but not enough to stop the massive water load and weight build up in the soil from recent extreme rainfall events.
No tree and I would argue, no human activity on the land surface is either causing this deep seated erosion. It is a natural geological process albeit damned expensive and disruptive to people in the flood paths of those catchments
OMG - blaming nature for his monocultural industrial forest slipping down a steep hill in heavy rain - maybe he should look at a real forest - like the ones in Fiordland and Westland that don't. I would be interested to see how the rest of the Urewera's, forested by native forest, faired with regards to slips.
Interesting drone footage of the slip on the Northland railway, on stuff website. If you compare it with Google maps street view of the adjacent road, both road and rail have very small culverts for the size of the valley. Obviously they did not have drone coverage in the 1900's, nor the resources to build anything bigger than what was enough to get the road and rail across. But in the century since, we have done little to improve such infrastructure. Except after a slip of course.
This ostensibly is BS. Forest waste/slash is easily recognised, because the branches and logs have saw cuts at one or both ends. 99.99% of the pine debris purportedly is forest waste/slash. Neil Woods seems to be a "for ever Trump supporter". His forestry industry allegedly are using our streams and rivers as toilets to flush their waste/slash; which saves them hundreds of millions of dollars each year by not having to clear their hillsides of waste before replanting.
Perhaps you have data that shows this was true for Cyclone Gabrielle, but it wasn't true for other recent cyclones.
GDC looked at what was piled up on the beaches after Cyclones Cook and Hale. In 2017 on Tolaga Beach about one-third of it was willow/poplar, while about 14% was recently cut pine (i.e. slash plus stray sawlogs). Most of it was weathered pine that had ended up in the river system long before the cyclone - a legacy of past bad practice, though not necessarily recent bad practice. (They did find other evidence of poor recent practice though, and companies were fined). About 8% of the pine still had root plates attached.
When they looked after Cyclone Hale, at Tolaga Bay and another beach location it was 70-80% pine, while in two other beaches it was 50% pine, according to what they told the NZHerald. Not sure how much had roots intact.
Council seems keen to downplay its own role in contributing to the mess with its management of riverside willows and poplars. Looking at some pre-Gabrielle aerial photos, there were a lot of surprisingly neat-looking recent forest harvest sites (especially compared with 2017), but also lots of legacy pine slash stranded further down the catchment, and lots of felled willow lying on the riverbanks. Even if harvesting was as good as is possible, it looks like remediation of past events wasn't, and 50cm of rain was enough to mobilise the lot.
Spoken purportedly like a true Trumpist forestry man, ostensibly always ready to spread alleged insidious fake conspiracies.
Your statements allegedly prove the forestry industry is using NZ's streams and rivers as forestry's personal toilets.
FACT CHECK - it allegedly is waste as it (be it pine slash or any other pine material) has been produced or is a by-product or an adverse effect of production.
NEWS FLASH - There is no excuse for NOT appropriately containing all forestry waste (be it slash or any other pine material) within commercial, privately owned land.
I feel the elephant in the room is, why haven't you been charged by the NZ Police for alleged wilful damage and possibly man-slaughter by now?
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