The genius of capitalist entrepreneurship continues to impress (as this underwater logger shows), and one wonders, have the costs of building the Auburn Dam factored in the profit to be made by logging the wood that would be submerged by the lake forming behind it?
Winter 2007
Volume 25 | Number 4
Water Logged
By James Lucas
It is the holy trinity of the new Green Economy--a company which improves the health of the natural ecosystem, makes places safer for people, and at the same time makes a profit. Triton Logging Inc., of Victoria, British Columbia, is positioning itself to achieve all three.
Forgotten forests
For much of the past century, decisions have been made to flood vast areas of land to harness the power of water that collects in reservoirs behind large dams. In many of these areas, forests remain locked in time beneath the newly formed lakes.
Limited harvesting took place in these forests prior to flooding. The relatively short timeframe to plan and build a dam (2 to 5 years) versus the relatively long timeframe to log the standing timber (10 to 20 years) made the economics of logging untenable. In some cases, either the technology was not available at the time to harvest or mill these quantities of timber, or the species in the forests was considered undesirable or so abundant that forgoing the resource was deemed an acceptable loss.
In the United States alone, there are more than 6,500 large dams. According to the International Commission on Large Dams, there are nearly 45,000 large reservoirs (more than 15 meters or 45 feet in height), many of which hold submerged forests. The quantity and potential value of this resource is vast—estimated at 300 million trees worldwide—with an approximate worth of $50 billion.
The yellow submarine
Enter Triton. The company has built the world’s first deepwater logging machine, appropriately called the Sawfish. The machine is an unmanned submarine, tree harvester, and tree recoverer—all in one. Similar in size to an Austin Mini Cooper car, the Sawfish, which can dive to 300 meters (900 feet), has a grapple system capable of wrapping its arms around a tree with a 4-foot diameter. Once the machine attaches itself to the base of the tree it is to harvest, an airbag is screwed into the base of the tree and inflated to 350 pounds of lift. When the airbag is full, a chainsaw cuts through the trunk, and the tree then floats (or in some cases launches) to the surface of the water. The Sawfish pilot, who sits safely on a barge, finds each tree via a sonar system on the Sawfish. When visual contact is made, eight fully remote video cameras allow the pilot to “fly” the machine closer to the tree. The Sawfish contains approximately 50 airbags so that it can stay below the surface for a few hours if necessary. It takes two to four minutes to cut each tree.
