Ross Muirhead stood at the edge of a forestry cut block filled with stumps, rain pelting down as he watched water rushing over the barren ground.
"These culverts are undersized for climate-change conditions, with atmospheric river events," he says. "All across the Sunshine Coast, the majority of them were designed and put in place in the 1950s, when the highway was engineered." The province's logging agency, BC Timber Sales, was set to decide by the end of this month whether the Mount Elphinstone harvesting rights will be put up for auction in April.
The agenda for the board's meeting in March includes a reply from Pierre Aubin, a professional forester with BC Timber Sales on the Sunshine Coast. His letter says the agency is implementing all of the recommendations from the existing watershed assessment completed by the consulting company Polar Geoscience.
It says this traditional method leads to results that are "diametrically opposite" to the alternative approach that the study's authors advocate. But study co-author Younes Alila, a professor in the forestry department at the University of B.C., says the significance of the debate is more than just academic.
It's crucial to consider frequency because dikes and bridges can fail when battered by peak flows that are happening more often, he says, even if the rushing water doesn't exceed the maximum capacity of the infrastructure."What drives me is not conservation. It's not my care for the environment, although I would care," he adds. "What drives me is the science, period.
It provided its recommendations "with the specific objective of minimizing risk" and incorporated "a degree of conservatism" beyond that of previous studies in the area, the company says in a response posted to a B.C. government web page. Polar suggested that threshold for the Mount Elphinstone area, and BC Timber Sales says it has incorporated the company's recommendations.
Only a "probabilistic" approach can unravel those relationships to reveal how "super-sensitive" B.C.'s watersheds are to the cumulative effects of forest loss, he says.
Energy Energy Latest News, Energy Energy Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: timescolonist - 🏆 15. / 75 Read more »
Source: BurnabyNOW_News - 🏆 14. / 77 Read more »
Source: PGCitizen - 🏆 65. / 51 Read more »
B.C. to add 500 public EV charging stations to fill gaps in networkpA statement from the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation says it's providing $30 million from this year's budget to expand B.C.'s "electric highway" by adding 500 public electric-vehicle charging stations/p
Source: AutoNewsCanada - 🏆 77. / 51 Read more »