History in the making

First seedling planted at Bobtail Lake fire site

May 11, 2020 | 12:18 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – History was made. Five years to the day after the Bobtail Lake wildfire burned 25,000 hectares of land, the first of 1.1 million seedlings was planted at the site.

It took a lot of creative thinking on the part of Pacific BioEnergy to make it a reality. The timber licence for that land is held by one of the major licencees and PacBio had to piggy-back off of it to gain access.

“How can we benefit? There is some dead pine which lit up during the fire, of course, but it left a lot of stands that we felt we could recover,” explained John Stirling, CEO for PacBio. He says the salvage wood was not viable as a sawlog, nor was it deemed workable for pulp due to the burnt nature of the wood. But PacBio found a way to put the wood to use, rather than see it piled up and burned.

The plan is to plant 1.1 million seedlings into the ground. But PacBio is not in the treeplanting business. That is where Strategic Natural Resources comes in.

“Obviously with things like COVID-19 and the current state of the industry, it’s been slow. Very slow,” explains Alex Forrester, Regional Manager for Strategic Natural Resources. “So to have this opportunity to keep some local people working, it’s actually helped us keep some people working through this time.”

The plan is to have all 1.1 million seedlings planted at the Bobtail site by mid-summer.

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