Gone with the Wind
Clearing up after Klaus
The severe storm that hit the coastal forests of south western France and north western Spain in late January this year felled as much as 70 per cent of the pine trees in parts of the coastal Aquitaine region, south of Bordeaux. About 1 million hectares of Aquitaine forest, which are predominately Pinus pinaster (Maritime pine), were affected with 300,000 hectares ‘seriously hit’, and 60 to 70 per cent of trees felled with ‘dramatic consequences’. In total, in excess of at least 30 million cubic metres of timber in the Aquitaine region has been affected by windblow.

95 per cent of this is privately owned. We have not heard as much about this storm as we did 10 years ago, when many UK contractors and hauliers took the opportunity to transport equipment to France to assist with harvesting operations. Perhaps this is because the French
timber industry has of course seen and had to deal with it all before, and is simply going about the mass clear-up quietly and efficiently this time around. However, due to the sheer scale of the damage and the need to get log-sized timber cleared ahead of insect infestation, we were invited down in to view the state of the woodlands and to see if we could provide any assistance.

Such a colossal amount of timber to deal with, balanced against the current global downturn affecting the markets, has led to most Frenchbased timber companies concentrating initially on the establishment of ‘stackage’ storage areas, to hold the harvested timber. Each ‘stackage’ area is a major civil engineering project. Firstly the site is cleared of windblown timber, then destumped and mulched. The high water table in the region allows for the straightforward creation of high capacity water lagoons running laterally down the site. The vast area in between is then set out with a geometric system of roading and drains at 40m intervals. The 1m ‘gap’ between stacks is filled with a well organised irrigation network of pipes, sprayers and sprinklers.

These are fed by a large pumping/ recycling system flowing in and out of the lagoons. In between the metalled roads, a movable ‘corduroy’ road, fabricated from sawn sleeper-sized timber, allows trucks to haul timber and unload close to the stacks. A dual ‘in and out’ weighbridge installation completes a highly efficient facility capable of holding in the region of
350,000 tonnes. One private forest management company alone was developing six of these yards! If impressive empty, when seen even only part filled with round timber, the stackage site is a surreal place, even for the most hardened timber professional!

With the amount of ‘agency/ stakeholder liaison’ and paperwork processing required in the UK to legitimately fell timber, I wonder if and how we would react as an industry to constructing such storage areas? Hopefully we won’t need to test this concern anytime soon. With many stackage areas nearing completion, the industry in the Aquitaine has turned its attention to ramping up the production of harvesting the blown timber. Most of the badly affected area is flat, similar in ground conditions to a large-scale Culbin, Tentsmuir or Thetford FC forest! It therefore lends itself to a wide range of harvesting equipment from small harvester/ tractor-trailer forwarder combos to the purpose-built kit that we are used to.

The most common system deployed was a typically ‘European’ harvesting set-up of a larger harvester – JD1470 or equivalent – and smaller forwarder such as the JD1110. Whilst seeming like an unbalance, this made perfect sense of the combination of large, rough mean trees, short flat extraction distances, small coupes (many different forests and ownerships) and a
requirement to move between sites efficiently.

As ever in windblow situations, whilst some teams had mechanised solutions (an excavator/felling head on site as well) many were still dependent on motor-manual operatives
to ‘off root’ the stems – of course as close to the blown stump as possible! Cut-to-length harvesting has never been a more appropriate description for this type of work. The inherent twisted nature of the Maritime pine leads to the requirement of a multitude of very short lengths to be recovered to provide for an economic breakout.

Depending on tree size, typically 3 different quality/diameter grades of 2.65m logs, both 2.1m and 2.5m pallet and also 2.5m chipwood make up the 6-grade cutting profile/ matrix in each stand. This calls for precision cross-cutting and layout from the harvester operator and a very skilled and patient forwarder driver. Whilst I am sure UK operators could adapt, it was a far cry from green logs and pulp that we are used to in the north of Scotland.

There were, however, already non-French national contractors working in the Aquitaine, with
teams from Germany and Austria, as well as some of our more local cousins from the Emerald Isle who were there with haulage capacity as well as forest machines. The Austrian crew were working some conventional machinery (harvester/ forwarder) but also a different machinery solution in the form of a brand new Konrad mountaineering ‘Highlander’ harvester fitted with a clamping bench (clam bunk). This innovative machine, with a 250hp Iveco engine as a powerplant, certainly seemed well suited to working windblow. A fully rotating cab and Woody head allowed for efficient handling and loading of the clam operations, with all hydraulic pipework safely inside the 10m reach crane. The 4-wheel drive and crab steer configuration with patented step drive (extending drive legs) pulled the load out to roadside where again the Woody head proved to be an agile unit, this time processing.

We only saw this mountaineer working on flat ground, and I would question its ability in softer conditions, but it would make an excellent addition to a skyline set-up. If you’re more interested you can see them (like everything else) on YouTube. In terms of timber haulage, as well as local rigs there seemed to be a good number of European selfloading trucks contracted, including a good number from Belgium, running both artic and six and drag configurations. Some units were cross loaded, the grip from the thick bark of the Maritime pine aiding load security. Timber was flowing to local mills but also stackage yards for holding and railheads for onward transportation. Whilst difficult to gauge, I am sure most trucks were running on the optimistic side of weight limits.

Optimism, in terms of a slowly improving Scottish domestic round timber market(?) and several other factors, meant that we reached a decision not to take on any contracts this time around ourselves. Whilst in the end perhaps the logging rates didn’t impress, the scale, planning and professional management of the clear-up operation certainly did. Neil Stoddart