A Very Unique Task
August 22, 2014 11:12 am Leave your thoughts
These past two weeks I’ve been assisting with Weyerhaeuser’s aerial herbicide project. It was very unique task; I had the opportunity to stay in a camp, which was an awesome experience. The camp lifestyle took a bit of adjusting; my primary job during the spray was weather monitoring. This entailed getting up at 4:30 a.m. every morning and driving out to the cut block. Most of the cut blocks needing to be spray were fairly isolated so my weather-monitoring partner and I would quad into them before sunrise. We would use equipment to measure the temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction for each load of helicopter herbicide. You would then remain in the block recording data until one of four things happened: the temperature raised more than 25 degrees, the relative humidity dropped below 40%, the wind blew more than 8 km/h or it started raining. Once one of these circumstances occurred the window was closed for the morning and you’d go back to camp. On a normal day you’d generally be out from 5:00-11:30 in the morning. With that being said my absolute favourite part of staying in camp was the cooks because after coming back tired and exhausted they would have lunch ready for everyone. After lunch everyone relaxed or napped waiting for evening window. I played a ton of catan and euchre in my downtime, when we didn’t have odd jobs around camp to complete. After dinner you’d go back out to the block until sunset or until the window closed, roughly 5:30-11:00 p.m.
Basically that was weather monitoring. We were out there for two weeks never got rained on, only had one fire evacuation because of a nearby B.C. fire and saw a ton of wildlife driving at dawn and dusk everyday. All in all a really fun experience and a good way to end the summer. It’s insane to think I only have one more week at Weyerhaeuser before I fly home!
The helicopter flying in one of our blocks, the bar along the front is where a mist of herbicide sprays out.
The helicopter landing on top of the mix truck to get filled up with herbicide and gas.
Cheers, Brooke