Loggers’ contract at Pakawau moves toward completion
Processing and loading logs alongside the road near Pakawau Saddle. Loggers have only five or six weeks work left before they finish their 18,000-tonne contract at Pakawau Bush. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
Loggers working their way through the Pinus radiata plantation forest of Pakawau Bush have only another five to six weeks of work left before their 18,000 tonne contract is finished.
The six-month job is being carried out by Southland logging contractor Dwanye Unahi and his six-man crew. The logs are being marketed by Mapua-based Pentarch Forest Products, who have been transporting the logs from Pakawau to both regional mills and Port Nelson for export.
Motorists driving to and from Whanganui Inlet in the last two weeks couldn’t help but notice the logger’s skid and loading site, set up alongside the road just east of Pakawau Saddle. A hefty bulldozer has been delivering the felled and unlimbed trees to the skids, where a highly sophisticated “waratah processing head” attached to a 30-tonne digger hydraulically delimbs and cuts the logs to length in quick fashion. They are then loaded by another digger onto waiting trucks.
Pentarch Forest Products local manager Craig McMiken said the operation had gone well.
“We’ve been very pleased with how the job has gone and results that have been achieved for the forest owner.”
Most of the forest-covered land at Pakawau is Crown Forest Land, with the trees and cutting rights owned by Don MacLachlan of Wellington, who has had extensive involvement and interests in the New Zealand timber industry for over 30 years. There is some adjoining public conservation “spill over” land at Pakawau with pines also growing on it, but this is not being logged at present. The New Zealand Forest Service planted out the Pinus radiata trees at Pakawau Bush between 1978 and 1981 after a big fire swept through the area. At the time five hundred kauri trees were also planted around Pakawau Saddle as a trial, but few if any survived.
Gerard Hindmarsh
