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.
The environmental advocate was storm watching during the atmospheric river disaster that swamped southwestern British Columbia in November 2021.
Muirhead says that without a healthy forest to help absorb the excess water, it was gushing toward a creek near the Sunshine Coast community of Halfmoon Bay.
“It was just complete surface run-off,” he says.
Muirhead went to see what was happening near the outlet of the creek and found highway crews already working — water and debris had caused a “complete engineering failure” of a culvert and the road on top of it, he says.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The harvesting plan has caught the attention of local officials, concerned about a situation that represents a case study on the impact of logging on forest hydrology and flooding — and how such risks are assessed in B.C.
Scientists say the stakes in getting it right are huge, with lives and billions of dollars in the balance during climate-related extremes and in a province where clear cutting has been a dominant practice for decades, affecting large swaths of the landscape.
A recent peer-reviewed study led by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) says “deterministic methods,” which are long-standing and widely used, result in projections that don’t reflect the true risk of flooding after logging.
The scientific methods behind watershed assessments inform the design of dikes, bridges and highways, with safety and cost implications for aging infrastructure built in a way that doesn’t reflect the risks, says Alila, who is also a professional engineer.
By contrast, Alila says probabilistic modelling takes into account the random nature of the forces influencing flooding — a complex interplay he calls “the power of the forest” — and produces projections about the likely severity and frequency.
Worsening climate change is shining a spotlight on “gaps” in the science of forest hydrology, especially around extremes such as flooding, says Martin Carver, a registered professional engineer and geoscientist who previously worked as a hydrologist for the B.C.
The original article contains 1,390 words, the summary contains 223 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
BC’s NDP should change their name to the New Conservative Party because they seem to prioritize profit over everything else.
