Thousands of trees were destroyed in a wildfire outside Halifax last year. Now some of them are returning in a very different form
About a dozen children dressed in matching blue coats and orange tuques snake through a wooded hillside dotted with blackened trees, the visible scars of a devastating wildfire that swept through the area last year.
Until recently, the journey through the normally well-worn trail to an outdoor classroom was largely impassable for the students at ForestKids Early Learning in Hammonds Plains, N.S., roughly 30 kilometres outside Halifax.
The charred trees were becoming weak, falling over and littering the forest floor.
But the excursion is part of the very fabric of ForestKids, a daycare that prides itself on educating its youngsters in a natural environment. The facility’s main building was one of 200 structures decimated by the wildfire that broke out May 28, 2023, in the nearby subdivision of Westwood Hills.
Although these trees are burnt, some are still valuable.
Many property owners in the woodsy suburbs of Upper Tantallon and Hammonds Plains are working with a group of organizations to have blackened trees removed from their land.
They are being given a new life at a lumber yard in Greenfield, N.S. Every part of the tree has a use — from wood pellets to lumber — lumber that those in the industry say could easily wind up helping rebuild homes destroyed in the very community they were plucked from.
And while clearing the trees has been cathartic for some residents who felt their appearance forced them to relive that day, those in forest ecology say they should have been left alone.
For ForestKids owner Terri Kottwitz, it means everything that little feet are able to march up and down the path once again.
Nevertheless, seeing the landscape of her six-hectare woodlot forever changed is not easy.
“You caught me at a good time, because we’re kind of getting used to it. If you had asked me a couple of months ago, I probably would be crying right now,” says Kottwitz, who not only lost her daycare in the fire, but also her home just a few steps away in the community of Yankeetown.
“The children have seen it at its worst and now they see it a little bit better.”
Matt Willett knows the rolling hills of these tight-knit communities well. The former resident was a volunteer firefighter during the wildfires last year. His children also used to attend ForestKids.
It’s for those reasons the forest manager felt a special calling to help those who lost everything.
“It’s been an emotional roller-coaster for the residents here,” says Willett, who works for Wagner Forest Management Ltd. and has been co-ordinating with homeowners, private contractors and a lumber mill to carry out the homegrown project.
“Foresters care about the forest. Firefighters care about their community. So it’s very impactful for me as well knowing the people in the community and sharing their personal stories.”
Many residents did not have insurance coverage for landscaping, or the coverage was minimal.
For some, the charred trees were a constant reminder of the tragedy — removing them, part of the healing process.
But residents were receiving quotes from arborists for tens of thousands of dollars, leaving them feeling discouraged and defeated.
Coun. Pam Lovelace, who represents the area, was fielding a lot of that frustration.
“Right after the fire, people were struck by the smell of the burnt trees. They were struck by the look of it and how dark it is,” says Lovelace, as cars whiz by on Hammonds Plains Road next to a large lot recently cleared of hundreds of trees.
Lovelace got in touch with Willett, who has now worked with more than 160 property owners to have trees removed from their land, in many cases free of charge. Some woodlot owners even made some money.
That’s because many of these burnt trees are valuable to those in the forestry industry.
The fire was intense enough to kill the softwood trees, but it only burned the outer layer. The inside is still perfect for lumber — but the clock is ticking. By mid-summer, the quality will no longer be good enough for sale.
Softwoods like hemlock and spruce also have a high windthrow rate, meaning they are prone to falling over in high winds, says Willett.
“They’re certainly not going to survive and they have a really good end use. It’s highly likely they’ll be going back into the homes that are being rebuilt in the community,” says Willett.
The mill that signed on to process the wood, Freeman Lumber, distributes their products locally, including to Rona and Redmond’s Home Hardware in Upper Tantallon.
The hardwood trees like birch and maple are not as valuable. But they also have a higher survival rate, so many homeowners opted to keep hardwood trees on their properties in the hopes they come back.
“They don’t usually burn as intensely hot as the softwood, so if those trees have a chance of surviving, we are leaving them standing, even if they have a 50 per cent chance,” says Willett.
“And I do think that there’s going to be quite a pleasant surprise how many of these trees leaf back out here.”
Willett and Freeman Lumber worked with every resident to decide which trees would stay and which would go. Some people wanted mostly everything removed. Some wanted all their hardwoods kept in the hopes it would sprout new life.
But not everyone whose home burned down was able to take part in the project.
A few properties were too tricky to access with the required machinery. Others had mostly hardwood, and so those residents would have actually had to pay to have them removed.
For Kottwitz, she ended up being paid about $7,000 for her trees, enough to buy a sprinkler system for one of the buildings at the daycare. She asked that all of the burnt hardwood remain untouched.
“We don’t feel too sad about having them gone. We felt sad to see them burned. But now that they’re gone, there’s room for regrowth,” says Kottwitz. “The ones that are still there that are burnt, we’re waiting patiently to see if there’s going to be any green on them.”
One of the most conspicuous examples of the tree-clearing project can be found just off Hammonds Plains Road, an important thoroughfare that connects the region to the rest of the municipality.
That few-kilometre stretch is sentimental for many who live there, offering a comforting sign of home with its leafy greens in summer, spectacular foliage in fall and dustings of snow in winter. Residents had to cruise by blackened swaths of trees almost daily. Now, much of it is gone.
“I was happy to be able to clear those trees along the Hammonds Plains Road, where people relive that trauma every single time they go to and from their community,” says Willett.
Most of those trees sat on the property of a single landowner — a man whose family has for generations lived in Hammonds Plains, a historic community first settled in by United Empire Loyalists in 1786 and later by Black refugees from the War of 1812. It will be up to the landowner to decide what to do with the former woodlot now that many of the trees have been removed.
It’s not hard to pick out which trees in the massive piles at Freeman Lumber came from Upper Tantallon and Hammonds Plains.
Nestled next to the rushing Medway River, the mill has been operating in Greenfield for nearly 200 years, employing hundreds from the surrounding rural enclaves of Queens County.
That sense of community is why its owners, Charles and Richard Freeman, were compelled to sign on to the project.
“They said, ‘Well you know we’re land owners too, right? If our forest burned, we’d want someone to help us clean it up and get a new forest started.’ And that was really it,” says Marcus Zwicker, the mill’s chief operating officer.
The blackened logs will make their way through the facility just as any others would after staff tweaked its scanning and sorting technology to detect which have a scorched outer shell, given that is not normally an imperfection they deal with.
“We were able to make some modifications and teach the machines basically what was good wood versus bad and able to saw and mix it in with our regular lumber,” says Zwicker as a logging truck creeps down the driveway, the driver waving as he passes.
“Once it enters our gates, we use the whole tree.”
From the moment it’s chopped down to when it’s sawed, sorted and wrapped in Freeman-branded packaging, the tree has passed through dozens of hands.
As much as 60 per cent of the trees will become lumber, which is shipped out across Atlantic Canada and to the United States.
The bark is burned to make energy to power its drying kilns on site, and Freeman sells what it doesn’t need to Brooklyn Power, a biomass-fuelled power plant.
Sawdust and shavings are sent to two local wood pellet plants, where they are made into chips for things like plywood, biomass and used in the pulp and paper industry.
Freeman Lumber wasn’t able to help residents in Shelburne County in the same way, given much of the burned areas were Crown land or inaccessible.
The company did, however, donate $20,000 to the Canadian Red Cross for recovery efforts and $35,000 worth of lumber to the We Rise Again Fund, which is helping residents rebuild and providing mental health supports.
Back in Hammonds Plains, Willett scopes up two children who ran into difficulty navigating the muddy trail, carrying them in either arm with ease as his boot squishes into a deep hole.
As he looks around the landscape, he explains that clearing some of these burnt trees actually removes fuel for any future fires that may come through.
“If you can imagine that you had a garden that was growing and you didn’t weed your garden and all the weeds were coming up and it was very thick, if a fire went through that, there’s a lot more fuel there and the fire would be a lot more intense,” he says.
It’s a claim disputed by Donna Crossland, who has dedicated her life to forest ecology. She works with the Healthy Forest Coalition, a group that protests clearcutting of Nova Scotia’s forests.
Crossland says she understands the appearance of the burnt trees can be retraumatizing for some, but she would encourage anyone with trees still remaining to leave them be.
“The forest recovers on its own. It’s almost like telling a burn victim they need a vigorous massage. No, you need a period of healing and care,” says Crossland.
She says forests renew at an incredible pace following a wildfire — the charred stumps providing perches for birds and habitat for other wildlife.
Crossland says once an area is burned, it’s unlikely to reburn. That’s because the fine fuels such as twigs, needles and leaves have already been burned up.
She compared it to starting a fire in your woodstove — you need kindling and paper to get it started, you can’t simply drop a log inside and expect it to burn.
Moreover, she said the messaging about removing fire fuels is more relevant in places like Western Canada and the boreal forests.
“In Nova Scotia, we are a finger of land sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean. And so it’s very moist,” she says, adding that this moisture also speeds up the decay cycle of a tree.
When a dead tree falls to the ground, it absorbs moisture and, in turn, makes the ground more moist and less flammable. Moreover, it can impede the runoff of water from the land and can help with flooding.
“A lot of our species need the forest cover, they need moisture and they just need long periods between disturbances, like I’m talking 100 years and longer,” says Crossland.
“There’s almost nothing you can’t fix with just helping a tree grow.”
The Department of Natural Resources has said it would not touch burned areas on Crown land.
This fall, new trees will be planted across wildfire-impacted regions.
A group of residents from the Upper Tantallon area have applied to Nova Scotia’s Thriving Forests program, which uses federal and provincial funding to develop tree planting initiatives as part of Ottawa’s goal to plant two billion trees across Canada.
Clean Foundation, a Dartmouth-based non-profit, is running that program and says the residents’ application looks promising, but is still going through the approval process.
Freeman Lumber will also be helping with tree-planting efforts in both communities.
But for those waiting and wondering, Willett says it won’t be long before burnt areas sprout new life and become lush once again.
“I’m looking forward to when we replant that area and the forest comes back and it’s vibrant and green again,” says Willett. “I think that will really help with the healing process in the community.”
Video producer, headline graphic: Dave Irish
Copy editing and layout: Elizabeth McMillan
