Wildfire Timber Salvage Operation Winding Down in NSW Australia

State-owned Forestry Corporation of NSW Australia has announced that starting July 1, 2021, there will be a ‘significant’ decrease in the volume of timber it can supply to AKD and Hyne timber mills. There will be no change to what is supplied to Visy, due to the age profile of what was affected by the fire. Dean Anderson, Forestry Corp Regional Manager, is reporting that the salvage operations following the devastating wildfires of 2019/2020 have been going well — better than expected — but because many of the trees were simply too young to produce usable timber they will have to be destroyed. “We’ve managed to harvest everything that was more than 24 [years old]. The importance of the 24 is that it’s an age where you’re more confident about saw log quality.” Mr. Anderson said Forestry Corp has been able to keep the mills running at 100% capacity so far, and they’ve almost finished harvesting the areas of timber that were older than 19 years. Mr. Anderson noted that, “It will be 30 years before we’re like 2018/19 again, that’s when these trees we’re planting will be 30 [years old], but we will hopefully start to see a lift in [volume] from about 15 years, because of replanting after the Billo fire. There will be a sustained period of lower volume.”