Kangaroo Island timber plan will mean hundreds of truck trips through Kingscote

The debate around timber plantations on Kangaroo Island is set to ramp up again, after revelations about the high volume of truck traffic planned for the island’s largest town.

Trucks will drive through Kingscote up to 222 times a day under a new plan to remove an estimated 4.5 million tonnes of timber from Kangaroo Island.

And owners of the island’s controversial timber plantations say they will need to burn wood every day in winter for 10 years if they can’t find a viable way to harvest and remove the fire-damaged trees.

Kangaroo Island Plantation Timber managing director Keith Lamb said his company had been forced to come up with an alternative plan to get the wood off the island because the state government was yet to approve a proposed deep sea wharf at Smith Bay.

Mr Lamb has now set a goal of shipping 600,000 tonnes a year via an upgraded wharf at Kingscote, and carting 200,000 tonnes a year via trucks using the SeaLink ferry at Penneshaw.

Logs and woodchips bound for loading at Kingscote would be stockpiled on council land near Kangaroo Island Resource Recovery Centre on North Coast Road, about 5km from the town centre.

Trucks carrying up to 56 tonnes of wood would cart their loads along North Coast Road and onto the Playford Highway to a revamped loading area near the existing jetty in the heart of the island’s largest town. The route is primarily on state government road but passes the Kingscote school and a school crossing.

Kangaroo Island Plantation Timbers boss Keith Lamb at Smith Bay. Picture Sarah Reed

“It’s my view that the community of Kingscote is going to be very unhappy when they understand what that (using barges at Kingscote rather than a deep sea wharf at Smith Bay) means,” Mr Lamb said.

“But that’s where we’ve ended up because the government hasn’t made a decision about Smith Bay – they continue to procrastinate.”

Mr Lamb estimated it would take five or six years to harvest and export the island’s timber crop, which he said was about 4.5 million tonnes of wood. He said the process would create about 170 jobs.

But KIPT is in a race against time to get the wood off the island before the fire-affected trees lose their moisture and are either downgraded or become unusable.

It has started felling and storing some of its higher-grade pine logs in dams to prolong their shelf life. Mr Lamb says there is enough of this export-quality structural pine on the island to build 10,000 houses and help ease a chronic timber shortage in the SA building industry.

The latest plan to remove the timber from Kangaroo Island is dependent on state government approval of both a purpose-built 18-25m loading jetty in Kingscote and deep-sea anchorage for large ships about eight nautical miles offshore.

KIPT workers David Oselton and Brian Stewart and at Macgill dam, where fire-damaged logs are being stockpiled. Kangaroo Island. Picture: Amy Pysden

If the company is unable to get the timber off the island, its worse-case scenario is pushing over the trees and burning the wood.

“To push and burn is not only an expensive operation but environmentally it’s very damaging because four and a half million tonnes of timber turns into 4½ million tonnes of smoke and ash,” Mr Lamb said.

“If we were to give up our strategy of salvaging the timber and just go straight to pushing and burning, I would imagine that in the space of about four years we could clear the estate.

“We would stack it up and we would burn it over the next 10 years. The burning window is fairly short, so we would start after Anzac Day and go through to late July, early August every year burning until it’s all gone.”

The Kingscote wharf plans engage bulk handling company T-Ports and forestry service Harvestco to take charge of the stockpiling, truck haulage and vessel loading.

T-Ports chief executive Kieran Carvill said this process would involve trucks loading the wood to transhipment vessel MV Lucky Eyre, which could carry between 2000 and 2500 tonnes at a time.

The MV Lucky Eyre loads grain onto the Seastar Empress in January this year 2021

The MV Lucky Eyre, already used to load grain on the Eyre Peninsula, would transport the wood to a large ocean-going vessel, capable of holding about 30,000 tonnes, moored in deep water in Nepean Bay.

Loading at the Kingscote wharf would be a four-hour process, which would be followed by four hours of no trucks on the road while the MV Lucky Eyre delivered the wood to the larger boat.

Mr Carvill said he expected to load one large ship a month, with each taking about six days to load. This would create up about 111 return trips from the stockpile to the wharf every day for wood chips – or 222 truck movements.

There would be about 60 return trips for logs – 120 truck movements. Log loading is a more time consuming process and too noisy to be done at night.

Mr Carvill said the companies would use modern, low-emission trucks with no air brakes and similar noise levels to passenger cars.

Kangaroo Island mayor Michael Pengilly said the council supported the Kingscote wharf proposal but was “acutely cognisant” some people would be concerned about the truck traffic.

“We wouldn’t want to stop trucks travelling on that road, it’s not our road anyway, but we would be seeking conditions on noise et cetera, et cetera to pacify local residents,” he said.

KIPT first flagged a deep sea port at Smith Bay in 2016 but the plans have run into vocal opposition from Kangaroo Island Council, neighbouring abalone farming business Yumbah Aquaculture and environmentalists.

T-Port CEO Kieran Carvill at Lucky Bay port. Photo: Robert Lang.

The proposal has been through three rounds of public consultation – the latest closing in February – and sits with the State Planning Commission, which will make a recommendation to Planning Minister and Deputy Premier Vickie Chapman.

KIPT loaded 300 cubic metres, about 300 tonnes, of pine onto a barge at Kingscote in March, to be shipped to a customer in South Korea. It also sent, via the SeaLink ferry at Penneshaw, one semi-trailer of wood to Jamestown and two to the South-East for mills to assess the quality of the trees.

All mills have ticked off on the quality of the wood and Morgan Sawmill in Jamestown needs the pine to ensure the viability of its future.