In B.C.’s forests, a debate over watershed science with lives and billions at stake

In B.C., a forest-harvest plan is raising hard questions and charged debate about the effects of logging on forest hydrology and flooding.

Ross Muirhead stood at the edge of a forestry cut block filled with stumps, rain pelting down as he watched water rushing over the barren ground.

The environmental advocate was storm watching during the atmospheric river disaster that swamped southwestern British Columbia in November 2021.

Muirhead says that without a healthy forest to help absorb the excess water, it was gushing toward a creek near the Sunshine Coast community of Halfmoon Bay.

“It was just complete surface run-off,” he says.

Muirhead went to see what was happening near the outlet of the creek and found highway crews already working — water and debris had caused a “complete engineering failure” of a culvert and the road on top of it, he says.

It was one of at least six washouts along a 40-kilometre stretch between Halfmoon Bay and Gibsons, says Muirhead, who lives in neighbouring Roberts Creek. He’s the founder of the group Elphinstone Logging Focus, named after the local mountain.

“These culverts are undersized for climate-change conditions, with atmospheric river events,” he says. “All across the Sunshine Coast, the majority of them were designed and put in place in the 1950s, when the highway was engineered.”

Now, Muirhead says he’s worried about plans for additional logging on the slopes of Mount Elphinstone, about half an hour’s drive north of his home.