Pine trees cut from more than 70 acres of beetle-killed forest will soon be burned off in Lake Country. Town
council has given special authorization for the burning after being asked to do so by fire Chief Steve Windsor. “We‘re in the burning season, so I could have given approval myself. But it‘s such a large volume of wood, I wanted to make council aware of what‘s happening,” Windsor said Thursday. The infected trees have already been cut from about eight different properties of varying size in Carr‘s Landing, the northwest area of Lake Country bor
dering Okanagan Lake. Cut trees are stacked in burn-ready piles measuring about 25 metres by 25 metres. Under terms of the burning permit, the debris wood can only be ignited when the venting index – a measurement of wind speed and air temperature – is considered ideal for the quickest-possible dispersal of smoke. “If we can get three days in a row with a good venting index, I think all the wood could be burned off without too much smoke staying around in the atmosphere,” Lake Country Mayor James Baker said. The option of chipping and hauling the debris to the landfill was rejected as impractical because of the cost involved in processing such a large volume of waste wood in that manner, Baker said. The swath of diseased trees in Carr‘s Landing is one of the biggest patches of forest near an urban area in the Central Okanagan to be hit so far by the beetle. Across the Okanagan-Shuswap region, the total area of forest infested by the beetle jumped from 294,000 acres in 2006 to 500,000 acres this year, Jim Snetsinger, chief forester for the Ministry of Forests said in September. The large scale removal of trees from the Carr‘s Landing hillsides likely foreshadows what will happen elsewhere in the Central Okanagan as the beetle spreads toward anticipated peak levels next year. “This is our first big infestation in Lake Country,” Windsor said, “but there‘s more of this on the way.”
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