The forest industries in Alberta and British Columbia are praying for an icy-cold fall and winter to help stop the devastating spread of the voracious pine beetle.

But they also realize urgent action must be taken to mitigate its advance and the economic devastation left in its wake.

While industry officials say the best remedy to stem the advance of the destructive pest is prolonged stretches of extreme cold, other measures and strategies are being implemented, including accelerated logging and plans to diversify the economies of affected communities.

In Alberta, which has yet to be hard hit by the beetle, industry and government say they are prepared to squash its advance.

Photo courtesy Canadian Forest Service
Beetles spout wings in the summer to migrate on west wind.

"Come this spring, we'll be as prepared as we can be to meet this challenge head-on," says Parker Hogan, spokesman for the Alberta Forest Products Association (AFPA).

"I think to wait for just a cold snap or to say we've got it so far would be to rest on our laurels; if we do that, the pine beetle will be in Hudson Bay."

In B.C., the emphasis in the worst-affected areas has turned from preventing infestations to salvaging what the bug has left behind, says B.C.'s Council of Forest Industries (COFI).

"We've moved from population control to salvage mode," says Doug Routledge, COFI's vice-president of northern operations. "Our concern in (areas already devastated) is reducing the depth and the duration of any timber-supply constraint. Whether we're harvesting the trees or whether the beetles are killing them, it has the potential to cause a timber supply problem to 40 years out."

An aggressive logging program by forestry companies and the B.C. government aims to salvage remaining trees that have yet to degenerate to the point where they cannot be used for products, and then begin to reforest.

"So what we're trying to do is to harvest those stands that will deteriorate the quickest," Routledge says.

"The sooner we can get those areas harvested and regenerated and growing forest again, it will reduce the length of time of this potential timber supply problem."

The AFPA's Hogan says the Alberta industry will watch how the extra timber entering the market will affect prices. However, he believes that demand to rebuild the Gulf region following hurricane Katrina could balance things out.

"It's going to be interesting. Right now we're seeing the after-effects of hurricane Katrina and there is a rising demand and it looks like it's going to last for a few years anyway. Lumber, panel board, other building products will be in great demand," Hogan says.

Over the past decade, pine beetles have struck millions of hectares of B.C. forests, stretching from Nelson in the south through to the Williams Lake and Smithers regions farther north.

Routledge says a number of factors have converged in recent years to foster ideal conditions for the pine beetle's proliferation:

* The succession of very mild winters since the late 1990s.

* Recent dry summers that rob trees of their natural defence mechanism of producing pitch, which can prevent the bug from boring into the bark.

* B.C.'s "enviable" fire suppression system, allowing the population of lodgepole pines - the beetles' favourite food - to quadruple since the early 1900s.

* The fact that most of the early epidemic expansion was in more remote areas and wasn't discovered until it was too late.

"It all came together at the same time to form what I like to call the 'perfect storm,'" Routledge says.

"In the west-central area (south and west of where Highways 97 and 16 intersect), there's no anticipation we will be able to stem the flow of the epidemic. It's damaged a significant amount of pine already; the (beetle) population levels are at such a high level that a succession of cold snaps would be needed to take care of the greater part of the population, and that's not realistic."

In the summer, the beetles sprout wings that allow them to migrate on the westerly winds. They destroy lodgepole pine by eating the bark when they lay their eggs and by introducing a fungus that impedes the flow of nutrients and water.

The three stages of a pine beetle infestation start with the "green attack," when they first penetrate the tree; the "red attack," when the damage is done and the bug has moved on, leaving the pine coloured red; and the "grey attack," when the tree has lost its needles and is essentially dead.

The province and industry are also drafting a strategy to diversify the economies of communities that rely on the forest industry, once logging activities begin to decline in the next five to 15 years, says Routledge.

Efforts are underway by some companies to make greater use of grey-attack pines that can no longer be used for lumber. Some oriented strand board (OSB) plants have begun using damaged trees, while other ideas include turning the decayed wood into fuel pellets to be burned in cogeneration and other facilities.

Vancouver-based Ainsworth Lumber Co. Ltd. hopes to build a pair of plants in the Quesnel and Vanderhoof areas dedicated to producing OSB from beetle-killed wood.

"Ainsworth has a role to play in that," says forest manager Mike Kennedy. "With OSB - made out of strands or engineered chips - we can utilize a much higher amount of decay than can the sawmills."

In Alberta, which collaborates with B.C. on the issue, officials had hoped to torch 110 sq. km of trees in the Willmore Wilderness Park, north of Jasper National Park, to close an invasion route into Alberta used by the insects. But wet weather forced the government to postpone the burn - originally scheduled for mid-September to mid-October - until next year.

Michel Proulx, spokesman for the forest protection division of Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, says the postponement isn't a big concern because the burn was to be used as a preventive measure and not to attack an existing population.

A summer program targeting individual pines saw 5,300 trees cut and destroyed in the Willmore and Kakwa areas, and another 1,200 in the Bow Valley corridor.

"That's the scale we're talking about now in Alberta," says Proulx. "It's pretty small and we want to keep it small. All our actions are very aggressive and we want to be aggressive because we want to keep it small."

Pat Wearmouth, a forester with Weyerhauser Co. Ltd. in Grande Prairie, commends both the Alberta and B.C. governments for their actions to make the boundary separating the two provinces the bug's Waterloo.

He says the most worrisome infestation for his company and others in Alberta's Peace Country lies south of Dawson Creek in B.C., which abuts the forest management area it logs.

"So far our forest management area had only 20 dead trees found this summer. That's nothing to get too concerned about, but we have our eye on it."

Experts say it would take weeks of -35°C temperatures in October and November - when they are vulnerable - to kill them off, or in Alberta's case, a few days of warm chinook winds followed by punishing cold. This is because the beetle produces a natural anti-freeze that disappears only when temperatures rise substantially.

Wearmouth and others in the industry believe recent warmer winters helped the beetle enter the Alberta Peace region. He says a pre-Christmas cold spell could wipe them out.

The B.C. industry, meanwhile, received good news last week when the federal government released the first of three instalments of $100 million over three years to the Canada-B.C. Implementation Strategy, a three-year business plan to mitigate the effects of the pine beetle attack.

"The pine beetle epidemic is the worst natural disaster ever to hit our forests," B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell said in a news release... . That's why we need unprecedented cross-governmental co-operation, including local community solutions, and that's why we have and will continue to dedicate unprecedented resources to assist in this effort."

The new funds come in addition to the $101 million that B.C. has dedicated over the next three years.

Among the target areas for funding include: Controlling the beetle's spread in parks and areas along the outer edges of the infestation; economic development and diversification planning; and research and development of new wood products and markets.

- With files from The Canadian Press