Sunday, July 12, 2015

Western Canada is burning up

 

We’ve been travelling back and forth through BC for a lot of years now.  Its probably 15 years since the mountain pine beetle first started devastating vast swaths of forest.  As we drove past thousands of acres of dead pine trees we always commented on how at some point those trees would have to go up in flames.  There were several mill fires when they cut that standing dead timber and then attempted to saw it.  The dead timber gave off a drier sawdust which, not surprisingly, was explosive and I think there were three mills lost to dust explosions over the last 4 or 5 years.  This summer may very well be the one we’ve been expecting when the whole forest goes up in flames from BC to Manitoba.

BC isn’t in as bad shape as Saskatchewan but its early going.  We’ve got at least 6 weeks of normally dry weather before we can expect general rains in western Canada. 

The dry weather is a blessing for my garage construction project but its balanced by the extreme heat which seriously cuts into the time I can tolerate.  My mid-afternoon productivity goes down dramatically in the heat.  Progress this week consisted of building 7 trusses, getting them placed and sheeted.  I’ll put my trusses up against any store bought ones.  In fact, mine are considerably better.  The store bought ones are fine as long as you keep them standing up but they literally fall apart if you stress them on their side.  I didn’t deliberately handle mine flat but if they happened to get sideways on me I didn’t worry about it either.

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