Conservation Currents
Getting Logs Across The Stream
December 2009
by Shelly Stiles
Forest landowners, loggers and everyone who values clean water will want to know about Vermont’s Portable Skidder Bridge Initiative, a project of the Vermont Forest Watershed program. The program can help you borrow (if you live in the Lake Champlain Basin), rent, or build a tool to help you protect water quality while working in the woods or overseeing those working in the woods for you.
A portable skidder bridge
The time is right to be thinking about logging. Autumn mud season will be ending soon, and frozen soils will make it possible for loggers to start winter harvests. But what if a stream lies between the log landing (the place where logs are stockpiled for hauling away in a log truck) and the woodlot? How does a logger protect that stream from all the earth and mud that will be carried on equipment tires and tracks, and on the logs themselves? Soil, after all, is the most common pollutant associated with logging. It is the biggest threat to water quality on logging jobs.
For large streams, usually only a steel bridge or a culvert will support heavy equipment while at the same time protecting water quality. But both can be very costly.
For smaller streams (and about 85 percent of any watershed consists of headwaters and small streams), woods workers are increasingly turning to portable skidder bridges.
Vermont’s portable skidder bridge initiative has three components. The first, a rental program, began in 2007 in Lamoille County. Five such programs are in operation now across the state, and the newest one -- sponsored by the Bennington County Conservation District with lots of help from County Forester Nate Fice -- will offer its first bridges for rental in spring 2010.
The rental fee is low, usually about $100 a month. (Program designers hope the fee will cover the cost of replacing bridges down the road.) Paper work is minimal. And bridges are usually picked up at and returned to central staging sites. Many sawmills and lumber yards have volunteered to host bridges and help coordinate their distribution.
For those living in the Lake Champlain basin (in Bennington County, that’s Dorset and Rupert citizens of the Mettowee watershed), the second component, a free Loan and Education Program, can help. This program offers the use of one bridge annually, and advice and assistance in siting, installing, maintaining and removing it, to loggers whose operations might affect water quality in Lake Champlain.
The third component, for which funding is pending, will help cover the costs of materials for loggers wishing to build their own portable skidder bridges. (Materials usually cost around $1,500.) A decision on that grant proposal is due by the end of the year.
The bridges provided by the initiative are made from native eastern hemlock. Each bridge consists of three panels, each 4 feet wide by 20 feet long. The 14 bridges now available will support a 32,000-pound skidder or 50,000-pound forwarder over a channel about 14 feet wide. Eight new bridges due to be delivered in spring 2010 are heavier-duty and will support larger equipment and heavier loads.
BCCD hopes to be able to offer one regular duty and one heavy duty bridge for rent beginning in spring 2010. The William E. Daley Co. has generously offered to store the bridges when not in use at their Shaftsbury and Manchester facilities. These locations are convenient for operators traveling to mills in the Rutland area.
We’ll have more information on the BCCD program in 2010. Meanwhile, to learn more about the state’s portable skidder bridge programs, contact Watershed Forester Gary Sabourin at 802-241-3672, Loan and Education Program Coordinator Kevin Beattie, at 802-442-4475, or us at BCCD, 802-442-2275. We can get you brochures, a video on the bridges, and construction specifications.
Shelly Stiles is the district manager for the Bennington County Conservation District, whose mission is promoting rural livelihoods and protecting natural resources in Southwestern Vermont. Web site at www.bccdvt.org.
This column appeared in the Bennington Banner in December 2009, as one of the BCCD's Conservation Currents pieces, a bi-weekly feature written by BCCD board and staff members since August 2006.