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Kalesnikoff Lumber shares forestry information about Duhamel Creek

The West Kootenay lumber company holds the license to log in the watershed and the Duhamel Watershed Society wants water quality monitoring.
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The mid valley portion of Duhamel Creek

The North Shore Hall was filled with approximately 100 people as Kalesnikoff Lumber Company held a public meeting on Wednesday evening to share information regarding their forest management within the Duhamel Creek watershed.

Tyler Hodgkinson, a registered professional forester and woodlands manager for Kalesnikoff, led the meeting and presented a historical review of previous logging up to the present day in the Duhamel Creek drainage to which the company now holds the license to log.

The meeting was an information session, said Hodgkinson.

“It’s not to debate whether we should be logging in a watershed,” he said, adding that the government made that decision already. “I want people to know we’re not a bunch of barbarians, we are professionals.”

Also in attendance at the meeting were members of the Duhamel Creek Watershed Society, Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations tenure office Rob McRory and Regional District of Central Kootenay Area F director Tom Newell. With several professionals presenting technical data, the meeting ran longer than three hours.

One of the topics discussed was landslides.

Map showing slides, culverts and cross ditches on Duhamel Heights Road. Courtesy of Apex Geoscience.

There have been three previous landslides on the Duhamel Heights Road that switchbacks through one of the cutblocks, one in 1997 and another in 2012 that significantly effected residents in the alluvial fan of the Six Mile area.

Kim Green of Apex Geoscience presented her hydrogeomorphic risk assessment (watershed assessment) for Duhamel Creek.

Green concluded the frequency of damaging flooding events is not because of logging, but due to high temperatures in 1997 and a high level rain-on-snow event in 2012. With that she made several recommendations to Kalesnikoff for their future application to harvest an additional 46 hectares in three separate blocks in the watershed.

Those recommendations included:

“To avoid increasing the frequency of larger floods, harvest levels in Duhamel Creek should be limited to less than 18 per cent and any future blocks should be planned so as to balance the cut across aspects on slopes below 1,350 metre elevation.”

“Roads and trails on or above unstable or potentially unstable slopes must be designed and deactivated ... to avoid concentrating and diverting surface and subsurface runoff. Drainage structures are to be sized to accommodate increased surface flows following harvesting.”

She later told the Star that it has been established that the slides on the Duhamel Heights Road are due to the old road deactivation, a legacy from the Small Business Program in the 1990s, prior to Kalesnikoff’s licencing, which Rob McRory confirmed.

Green explained that basically the organic matter called perch was loaded on top during the initial road deactivation. The loamy matter picks up the water increasing the soil weight causing sloughing and slides.

Road building and deactivation has improved since then but when a licensee takes over, they inherit all that comes with it, including past problems.

Hydrologist Kim Green of Apex Geoscience presenting her Duhamel Creek Hydrogeomorphic risk assessment. Photo by T. Hynd

Green’s review did include assessing the cribbing in the lower reaches of the creek. She said the dredging of the two channels that were cribbed in the 1970s have essentially filled in since then and the cribbing itself is aging. She believes in a high flood event, the properties below are at a high risk of flood damage and said she feels the RDCK needs to step up with a warning system and possible repairs to the cribbing.

Newell later said that there is an evacuation plan in place and he will be speaking with the Ministry of Highways and Transportation and said that the problem with adding services such as cribbing repairs means the area resident tax payers would be paying for it.

Nadine Podmoroff from the Duhamel Watershed Society said the society had raised funds to hire a profession but did not receive documents that were requested from the company. “We’ve requested 40 maps and not received one. We [continue] to request that you send the maps.”

Hodgkinson refuted the accusation stating, “We did send out those maps.”

In a written statement to the Star, Randi Jensen of the Watershed society explained the watershed society  “was formed as a way to be stewards of our watershed. As stewards we are concerned with understanding the impacts of climate change, natural events, and logging practices within the Duhamel Watershed.

She said the society was formed with the purpose to work with Kalesnikoff in way that takes into account the various risks of serious floods, maintain the quality of  drinking water and to find sustainable ways to manage the ecology of the forest.

“There is no oversight from government ministries and we are at the mercy of the moral guidance and oversight of self-regulated logging companies (licencees). I don’t know if people are aware of that — we sure weren’t when we first got into this,” she wrote.

Jenson went on to say “there appears to be some good will from Kalesnikoff, a local company, but its important to remember that they are a business, operating under a system of self-regulation.”

She also noted that “600 people get their water directly from the Duhamel Watershed. And, the fact is, there have been three slides already in the area... and there are hundreds of homes potentially impacted if there is a major slide.”

Jenson added that the watershed society wants to see creek water monitoring to understand the effects of both natural events and possible effects of logging and logging roads in the watershed.

“At the meeting Kalesnikoff’s professional lost the opportunity to raise cohesion between themselves and the community because their professional used up most of the allotted time going over very technical data and information leaving limited time for interpretation of the science, discussion and questions. When one of our hired professionals tried to speak he was shut down. That was extremely counterproductive.”