17 Seprember 2013

Canterbury forest owners are up against the clock as they face the huge task of recovering a massive amount of wind-blown wood from their plantations in the next few months.

Logging crews are to be brought in from outside the region to help with the clean-up and wood recovery in plantations, wood lots and shelter belts left in tatters by last week's wind storm.

Canterbury-based forestry consultant and manager Allan Laurie said hundreds of thousands of tonnes of wood had been felled or, according to one estimate, the equivalent of up to five years' harvest. He says it's too early to put an estimate on the cost of the damage but it's the worst he's seen in his 26 years in the industry.

Forest owners would have to move fast to recover the wood before it started to deteriorate, he said.

"For the domestic market, where the buyers demand that the wood is free of sap stain ... we've got only probably two to three months to get that wood into them in a non-contaminated state," Mr Laurie said.

"But the export scene is a little bit easier. The Chinese, which is the dominant market for Canterbury, they're not quite so concerned about sap stain because the timber is mostly used in form work -- holding up concrete and so forth.

"So... we may have up to 12 months to recover volume where it's going to export."

Mr Laurie said his company has already made arrangements to bring extra logging contractors in from Southland and Nelson. But he estimates at least four or five more crews will be needed just to handle the clean-up in the plantations the company manages.

Source: Radio New Zealand news