News in timber

Television station KREM-2, a CBS affiliate, is reporting that there are multiple wildfires burning throughout the Inland Northwest. The fires started on Labor Day and were the results of extremely windy conditions.

Weyerhaeuser Company announced today that it has entered into two distinct agreement to purchased timberland from and sell timberlands to funds managed by Hancock Natural Resources, a Manulife Investment Management company.

The spruce beetle outbreak has been raging in the forestlands in the Prince George B.C. district for more than 30 years. There is only a short window to log the dead trees before they lose their commercial value.

The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture is urging all regional foresters to quickly implement the administrations vision for forestland usage.

On Wednesday (8/19) Oregon Gov. Kate Brown declared a state of emergency due to what she called the imminent threat of wildfires across the state. In a news release Brown said, much of the state is now in extreme fire danger, and red flag warnings have been issued for hot, dry, windy conditions and dry thunderstorms.

Thanks to support from the State of Victoria Government in Australia, millions of tons of plantation timber burnt in the NSW during the summer brushfires that would have gone to waste will now be salvaged and sold.

A beetle, no larger than a grain of rice, the tiny mountain pine beetle, has already destroyed 15 years of log supplies in British Columbia and they are now chomping their way through forest in Alberta and other parts of the Pacific Northwest.

The U.S. Forest service, in an environmental analysis published earlier this week, is recommending the lifting of a 25-year-old ban on logging large diameter trees across six national forests located in Central and Eastern Oregon.