Lessons learned from Tolaga Bay

THE LESSON FROM TOLAGA BAY IS THAT we may end up with smaller clear-cut areas that are more spread out, Forest Enterprises CEO, Bert Hughes, told the HarvestTECH 2019 conference in Rotorua.

The sheer weight of the rain, plus all the clear cuts, was a bad combination and though they’ll always be there “because that’s how Radiata works”, we can do better with clear cuts, says Mr Hughes, making them smaller and more spread apart.

There are factors out of our control, particularly frustrating for a director in terms of risk, he says, adding: “The East Coast is essentially the floor of the ocean that got inconveniently pushed up.

“It grows really good trees right, but it’s essentially just silt that went hard. When the loggers and loading guys are doing the job, they do it out there. So all of the good intentions in the office are essentially worthless. You’ve got to try and control the site as much as you can but with a quarter of a metre of rain I’m not sure you can do enough.”

Nonetheless there are some things you can do. Do it right the first time and get in the proper expertise: “One of the things we ought to do as an industry is have more civil engineers, because with the best will in the world sometimes foresters are not engineers, so don’t kid yourselves, get experts when it comes to roading.”

His company is in the process of getting LiDAR plots of its forestry “because we would not have put those roads there had we known what’s underneath”.

With the customer at the core of everything, sometimes going a little slower and more carefully will be “a better return for the people whose money and assets we’re looking after”, he adds.

Another issue is leaving waste upstream. Though it’s hard to get hazards out of streams, Mr Hughes says contractors should not “walk past the problem”.

“There’s general agreement that very little bad practise happened around those areas that were damaged,” he says. “It’s largely a rainfall event and timing. It seems to have been mid-slope failure. Whole trees seem to have migrated off the middle slopes, got heavy and gone down. So try not to leave hazards upstream. Try and get them out the stream. That’s easier said than done.”

Dead trees, weak ground, wind and rain