In B.C.'s forests, a debate over watershed science with lives and billions at stake

Ross Muirhead stood at the edge of a forestry cut block filled with stumps, rain pelting down as he watched water rushing over the barren ground.

The environmental advocate was storm watching during the atmospheric river disaster that swamped southwestern British Columbia in November 2021.

Muirhead says that without a healthy forest to help absorb the excess water, it was gushing toward a creek near the Sunshine Coast community of Halfmoon Bay.

"It was just complete surface run-off," he says.

Muirhead went to see what was happening near the outlet of the creek and found highway crews already working — water and debris had caused a "complete engineering failure" of a culvert and the road on top of it, he says.

It was one of at least six washouts along a 40-kilometre stretch between Halfmoon Bay and Gibsons, says Muirhead, who lives in neighbouring Roberts Creek. He's the founder of the group Elphinstone Logging Focus, named after the local mountain.

"These culverts are undersized for climate-change conditions, with atmospheric river events," he says. "All across the Sunshine Coast, the majority of them were designed and put in place in the 1950s, when the highway was engineered."

Now, Muirhead says he's worried about plans for additional logging on the slopes of Mount Elphinstone, about half an hour's drive north of his home.

Muirhead isn't alone. The harvesting plan has caught the attention of local officials, concerned about a situation that represents a case study on the impact of logging on forest hydrology and flooding — and how such risks are assessed in B.C.

Scientists say the stakes in getting it right are huge, with lives and billions of dollars in the balance during climate-related extremes and in a province where clear cutting has been a dominant practice for decades, affecting large swaths of the landscape.

The province's logging agency, B.C. Timber Sales, was set to decide by the end of this month whether the Mount Elphinstone harvesting rights will be put up for auction in April.

The agency reduced the potential area available for logging to a total of 13 hectares over two cut blocks following a watershed assessment last year, and says it has committed to harvesting only half of what the Mount Elphinstone area can "sustainably support."

A public information bulletin says the method would be "partial cutting," with 500 trees left standing in addition to substantial patches set aside for wildlife and reserves.

But Muirhead is still concerned about the effects of additional harvesting and the extension of logging roads on a landscape that he describes as "dying from a thousand cuts" sustained over more than a century of development.