RAVAGED FORESTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 33, 9 February 1939, Page 12

RAVAGED FORESTS

VICTORIA'S LOSSES

PLAN TO SAVE INDUSTRY

(From "The Post's" Representative.) SYDNEY, February 3.

A thousand million feet of millable timber and about 4,000.000 acres of State forests were destroyed by the recent bush fires in Victoria, according to a report prepared by the executive of the Hardwood Millers' Association. "From reliable surveys," the report states, "we regret to learn of the almost total destruction of our mountain ash and woolly butt forests, very severe damage to, and in some cases destruction of, our messmate areas, and the total loss of nearly all our regenerated young forests. It is thus apparent that all* the ash forests will have to be felled during the next two or three years, and our anxiety is how to prolong the cutting life of sawmills, to provide continuity of work for the thousands of men engaged in the industry, and to piece together in workable unison the fragments of a hitherto prosperous industry which has been torn asunder by disaster." Out of the fires has emerged one of the greatest salvage plans contemplated in any part of the world. Its basis is scientific and its aim the preservation of the burnt standing timber in the blackened forests. Its operations will employ at least 2000 bushmen apart from saw-mill hands. If it succeeds, it will give the otherwise doomed timber industry 20 years of life. If it is only partially successful, it will prolong the industry's life to some degree. If it fails completely, the timber industry will last at most three years. In any case, in three or 20 years, a long gap imist follow. The fires have killed regeneration and only time will show how long regeneration will take or whether it will occur at all. The basis of the salvage scheme is that the standing timber must be cut immediately if it is to be saved. It then becomes logs, and the scientific problem is to save the logs. Logs left in the forest will be attacked by rot fungus and insect pests. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research has already begun experiments to test three proposed methods of preserving the logs until they can be coped with by the sawmills:— (1) The total submersion of the logs in water. This is only remotely practicable, because of the cost of constructing dams. (2) The creation of log dumps in gullies, the dumps to contain between 20 and 30 million feet of logs each, and the diversion of streams over them to keep them wet. In these conditions, they would keep indefinitely. (3) The creation of "dry" dumps in stacks of 10 to 15 million feet, the research council to provide a system of preventing insect attacks.