New Pilot Project in BC Aims to Rehabilitate Wildfire-Impacted Forests

To help meet the continuing challenges facing British Columbia’s forest industry—including mill closures, timber supply shortages, and unprecedented wildfire seasons—Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation Ltd. (CCR), a joint venture company owned by the Tŝideldel First Nation and the Tl’etinqox Government, has recognized the need of creating a new opportunities within the sector.

New initiatives such as the pilot project to rehabilitate the 2017 Elephant Hill wildfire-affected area at Pressy Lake, with support from Forest Enhancement Society of BC (FESBC) funding, are an attempt to bring balance to the sector.

Daniel Persson, Registered Professional Forester and CCR’s Forestry Superintendent, explained that CCR had been contemplating new initiatives for quite some time since identifying the need for wood fiber utilization and rehabilitation work on the vast areas of land devastated after wildfires.

“It will take generations for the forest to regenerate in some of these areas, if at all unless someone steps in and helps, and that was part of our team’s discussion,” Persson said in a press release. “We became very motivated to start the pilot project initiative when Premier David Eby challenged innovative forestry companies to undertake the challenge of finding ways to utilize older burnt fiber at the Council of Forest Industries conference last year.”

Extracting 7-year-old burned fiber poses significant challenges owing to the brittleness of standing dead trees and complexities in management. Nonetheless, CCR remains confident that it can be achieved, enabling the utilization of fiber for job creation and cost-effective production of biomass products. The purpose of this pilot project is to help reduce wildfire risk and rehabilitate fire-damaged forests while producing a premium wood chip that will help offset the cost of the operations.

The first stage of the pilot project has the following objectives:

1. Preparing the area for planting by reducing the wildfire and safety risk of the area through the removal of dead wood to the closest roads for further processing.
2. Generating high-value pulp and biomass products through refined processing of fiber at the roadside.

In the next stage, the CCR team will be hauling the biomass products to their end users with help from FESBC funding. According to Persson, the team estimates it will see up to 1,000 truckloads of biomass created from this project if it is successful.

Persson noted that this is just the starting point of this project. The long-term objective is to have a fully regenerated forest left for future generations. This includes several phases and will take at least 3 years to complete, and that is when CCR will mark this project as complete.

“Every phase depends on the one before it, and our overall timeline from start to finish is flexible with our target to complete it over 3 years,” Persson added. “We look forward to what we will learn and how we can share this knowledge with others in the industry.”