Ugly little secret puts B.C.'s watersheds on the logging road to ruin

Stephen Hume Vancouver Sun
22 Nov. 2001

What's most interesting about the ministry of health planning's recent 147-page report on the state of drinking water supply in British Columbia is not what it says but what it doesn't say.

Oh, Health Planning Minister Sindi Hawkins and her officials are all for clean drinking water. They are all for the vast public expenditures required to add filtration plants and disinfection facilities across a province in which more citizens get sick from the water than anywhere else in Canada.

But the report doesn't address the provincial government's ugly little secret, which is that it is quite prepared to permit special-interest groups to ruin the province's watersheds for economic gain without being held accountable for the downstream costs that will instead be passed on to the poor, beleaguered taxpayers.

The report confirms -- albeit in a blizzard of euphemisms -- precisely what I've been saying here for more than a decade and what the Sierra Legal Defence Fund and the auditor-general concluded in their own studies over the last three years.

Successive B.C. governments deserve failing grades for their spineless refusals to protect the province's single most important resource from contamination by permitting heavy industry an almost unfettered access to watersheds that supply community drinking water. Government turns a blind eye because it is addicted to its share of resource revenues.

The forest industry, having logged high-value timber on the lower flood plains, now presses into the upper mountain basins where water is collected, stored in the snowpack and sheltered by forest cover, which delays its melting until far into the summer.

The problem is not logging. Any experienced faller knows that can be done in ways that minimize impacts. The problem lies in cutting costs by automating logging. Heavy equipment requires a vast expansion of the road network.

Harvest rate exceeds long-term sustainable yield. To get the timber out quickly, shoddily built roads are hacked across steep hillsides and ground cover is stripped. Grapple-yarders drag logs across fragile topsoil, tearing up a layer that's already thin and took thousands of years to accumulate.

With the shade provided by forest cover gone from entire hillsides, soil easily washes away. Deep snow melts more quickly and runoff from the clearcuts is accelerated and compressed into a shorter window.

Landslides are everywhere in logging country, usually where slopes above and below roads begin to unravel. The altered hydrology directs greater volumes of runoff into channels, which then erode. Existing streams become choked with debris torrents and the sediment turns pebbled salmon spawning beds into something that more resembles pavement.

There's plenty of denial from the forest industry, but it's belied by common sense. Anybody who travels the logging roads has seen mud slides and plumes of sediment pouring into rivers.

A decade ago, the province's chief forester warned that erosion was the single biggest environmental problem associated with logging. The Forest Practices Code, even now being “streamlined” by the new Liberal government, was supposed to address this.

But when Craig Pettit, a former forest service employee turned environmental watchdog, set out to investigate 34 landslides, new avalanches and debris torrents in the West Kootenay between May 1998 and December 1999 he found 82 per cent occurred just below logging roads or clearcuts.

More than 30 per cent of these logging roads had been built under the supposedly strict rules of a Forest Practices Code industry says is too onerous.

“This suggests that clearcuts and logging roads make a large increase in the likelihood of a landslide,” Pettit warned. It's a view corroborated by more than 20 other scientific studies that show that landslides occur up to 20 times more frequently in clearcuts and up to 300 times more frequently on logging roads than they do in previously intact natural forest.

Pettit's findings corroborate an environment ministry study of the ruined San Juan River watershed that found in 1994 that 67 per cent of landslides originated in logged areas while the remaining 33 per cent were road-related. Nearly all delivered sediments into streams.

The report from Hawkins' ministry makes the specious suggestion that rain is really what's to blame. Do they think we are fools? Any half-wit can see that runoff from a recently logged hillside carries more sediment than runoff from a pristine rain forest.

Turbidity -- the murkiness of water -- has long been associated with water-borne disease.

Disease agents in soil are washed into the water and suspended soil particles offer increased surfaces to which bacteria may bind.

Perhaps this explains why B.C. residents have suffered an average of one major disease outbreak per year -- including salmonella, toxoplasmosis, various parasites and micro-organisms and viruses that couldn't even be identified -- since 1980.

And things have been steadily getting worse, not better. The number of boil-water advisories issued to water districts across the province has increased by 1,600 per cent since 1984. Last August, 304 B.C. water systems -- about one in 10 -- had a boil advisory in effect.

Is it mere coincidence that the decrease in water quality for communities outside the Lower Mainland and Greater Victoria appears to parallel the massive and unsustainable increases in industrial-scale logging? Half of all the timber ever removed from B.C.'s public lands was taken off in the last 20 years -- a period in which forest industry profits exceeded $7 billion.

Yet dig into the ministry of health planning's report and you'll find a bureaucratic argument that the economic contribution of industrial activity in watersheds outweighs the risks posed to public health through degraded water supply.

No, it doesn't. There's no excuse for the destructive practices tolerated for too long by the bureaucrats and their political masters. The public shouldn't have to pay to clean up water after it has been contaminated through the greed and stupidity of special-interest groups.

And it's about time public health authorities found some spine and served notice that in the future, activities that can't be conducted without compromising the quality of community water supplies simply won't be tolerated.