The Coulson Group of Companies

By Paul Pashnik, ManagerForestry News

Forest Stewardship Plans (FSP)

Forest Stewardship Plans (FSP) The muli - licensee Arrowsmith TSA East Coast FSP is still under development. Ron Sorensen has been meeting with the other 2 licensees to get the draft plan ready for public review and comment. The draft plan should be ready for public review by the end of May. The East Coast (Bowser South to Shawnigan Lake) contains large areas of second growth which will be coming on stream in about 5-10 years for Coulson Forest Products Limited.

Tree Farm License 54 (TFL 54)

I am pleased to see that the Coulson Group has taken the opportunity to purchase a major equity position in the ownership of the TFL.

This new license will requre a tremendous amount of new forestry planning and engineering. The responsibilities have been assigned as follows:

Forestry Manager, Paul Pashnik RFT - Licence Management & Administration.
TFL Planning Forester, Ron Sorensen RPF - Management Plan, FSP, Inventory & Silviculture.
TFL Operations Engineer, Zoltan Schafer RPF - Cutting Permits, Road Permits & Harvesting.

In a letter to Henry Benskin, Assistant Chief Forester for the Province of BC, we have asked that TFL 54's new forest management plan, currently before him, be approved for the five- year period 2007-2011. This plan should result in a new area based allowable annual cut for the five- year period. An area based AAC is a recently new method of calculating the annual cut and is exactly what the Clayoquat Sound Scientific Panel has recommended for establishing a balanced harvesting rate for the forest Eco-systems of Clayoquat Sound.

We will also plan to obtain FSC certification for the forests within TFL54. The FSC Forest Land Certification should be in place within one year. This land base certification coupled with Coulson Manufacturing's FSC Chain of Custody certification will open up many new lumber markets in Europe and North America.

Spring Tree Planting

Approximately 54,000 trees covering 67 hectare were planted during April on various brush prone low lying harvested areas in the Toquart Bay area. There is another 160 hectares of logged area to be planted within the next 12 months. For this job 150,000 seedlings have been ordered and are growing at tree nurseries this summer in order to supply the seedlings needed to meet our planting obligations for CFP, Echa-Peh and the New TFL 54.

ISO 140001 Certification

The scheduled internal timberlands ISO 14001 audit was completed during the last week of March and the first part of April. The internal audit revealed :

An apparent mis-understanding on what is a reportable fuel spill and to whom to report it to. To clear the record, all fuel spills must be reported to your supervisor. The supervisor must then report such spills to the Environmental Manager and the Environmental Manager, or his designate, will then notify government agencies of reportable spills as set out under regulations and in accordance with the Coulson petroleum spill reporting S.O.P. and record such in our EMS database.
Some improvements to record keeping were also identified.

Overall the internal audit revealed that operations are in compliance with the Coulson EMS Program Policy Manual. A management meeting was held to review the internal audit report and approve action plans for implementing internal audit recommendations.

Our external audit for ISO 14001 and CSA Chain of Custody PEFC (Annex 4) is scheduled for May 1st to 4th. Please ensure spill kits and emergency fire suppression tools are on site, that crews know their location also, SOPs should be reviewed at the start of each project an crew shift change.

Forest Fire Suppression

An updated fire preparedness plan has been prepared for all logging and road construction operating areas. The plan was distributed to the supervisors on April 2nd. Annual Fire Suppression training will be held during the month of May. The training will consist of 2 separate courses as follows:

New Crewman - No previous training: One day basic fire suppression and safety (fire theory plus practical pump exercise and fire line organization plus fire drill with pumps).
Previously Trained Crewman ½ day basic fire suppression and safety refresher (fire theory reviewed plus fire line organization fire drill with pumps).

Logging supervisors will advise logging and road crews of the date and time of the training course.

Fire Season

Despite a very wet March and April, remember fire season is now in effect.
No lunch fires, and the emergency fire tools are to be only used for fire fighting.

April, 2007 Volume 07-124