Last week, smoke from wildfires in Washington and B.C. reached Saskatchewan. Air quality in Calgary was worse than that of Beijing. Alberta Health Services issued advisories. The City of Calgary prohibited backyard fires and promised $10,000 fines for violating the ban. In B.C., the Rock Creek fire burned down 30 houses, 15 other buildings and…
Treet – World’s Tallest Timber Building Treet is a residential building located in Bergen, Norway. The structural design utilized laminated timber. The apartments were created as modules off-site. When completed, the building will be 49,4m from entrance level. This is an ambitious project showing that it is possible to build urban housing with high density…
Powerful wind and rain that swept the Vancouver region on the weekend highlighted the vulnerability of trees weakened by a summer drought – and the challenges cities will face keeping their tree canopies healthy as climate change brings more severe weather. Saturday’s windstorm left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity after trees fell on…
Campfire bans have been lifted for most of B.C. heading into the Labour Day weekend, and rain in most areas of the province has helped crews make progress on most of the 176 fires burning in B.C. as of Monday afternoon. Campfire bans are lifted in the Kamloops and Southeast fire centres, although restrictions continue…
Some of the biggest lumber producers in the U.S. southeast are Canadian. Drawn to the region’s abundance of fast-growing timber, low log prices, and proximity to major housing markets, Canadian companies’ share of lumber production in eight southeastern states has quietly grown to 25% from just 3% a decade ago, according to Forest Economic Advisors…
The Department of Natural Resources has created a Forest Biodiversity Science Advisory Committee to enhance the management of Nova Scotia’s Crown-owned woodlands. The committee includes experts on forest science, biodiversity, ecological planning and spatial modelling. “I’d like to thank all the members of this committee for agreeing to take on this important work,” said Natural…
Building roads over swamps and muskegs has always been a challenge. Having them stand up to the weight of modern mining and forestry equipment has been even tougher. PRS-Neoweb, a geosynthetic polymer road base, aims to fill that gap by employing the strength of a honeycomb cell structure, coupled with a tough nano-engineered material. Using…
If the air feels just a bit fresher, it may be because the trees are making a comeback. Despite a lot of bad news on climate, our planet has become measurably greener, as seen from space. And that points to a way out of the climate crisis. A group of scholars at Australian, Chinese, Dutch…
Nova Scotia Power Inc.’s under-performing biomass plant in Point Tupper will save ratepayers more than $9 million in annual fuel costs, starting in 2016, because it is incapable of meeting its output targets. The plant is operating at about 70 per cent of its gross capacity of 63.8 megawatts. At its best, it can produce…
Alberta’s Liberal leader says the province needs to go after the former owner of a wood preserving plant to pay for the cleanup of lands west of Calgary’s downtown contaminated with nearly two million litres of toxic creosote. While taxpayers funded a $12.5 million containment wall that was constructed two decades ago to keep the carcinogenic liquid…