Trees are falling and blades are spinning
Posted By Brandon Bentley and Jamie Scott
Posted 2 months ago
The North Hastings High School Northern Outdoor Studies Class (NOS) started the week off by learning the safety precautions of brush saws and chainsaws. We looked at the personal protective equipment (PPE) that is mandatory in the workplace under the Regulations of Occupational Health and Safety Act. For personal protective equipment we have to wear chainsaw pants, green patch work boots or chainsaw boots, work gloves, a hard hat with a face screen and ear muffs, and an orange high visibility vest or chainsaw coat. We also learned simple maintenance about the brush saws before we went to do any work. We learned how to properly sharpen the different types of blades and what each blade is used for.
On Wednesday, part of the class went south of Bancroft to start our first trail clearing job. We first had to take a walk to see what we would be doing, get our safety protection on and watch Mr. Pomeroy demonstrate the proper handling and use of the brush saws. Travis Macdonald and Michael Gunter were the first to run the brush saws. The blades we were using are wood cutting blades that look similar to a skill saw blade but the teeth are offset 1 mm both ways. We also have another type of blade for the saws that we rarely use and it is for cutting grass, which basically looks like a trillium with three long blades coming off of the center of the blade. While they were doing a fine job cutting brush the rest of the gang was picking up the brush and piling it off to the side of the trail.
On Thursday, the class all went separate ways, some people sold tickets for the NOS raffle at Canadian Tire, while others went back down south of Bancroft to finish our first trail clearing job. The remainder of the class was in school doing odd jobs and working on reports for the Ministry of Natural Resources. Trail clearing production did not slow down until the afternoon when it began to rain. The brushing crew finished the trail in good time with plenty of time to get back to school for the buses.
On Friday the class was held up from starting a new trail because of the rain. We worked on group projects like deer harvest survey, lake trout spawning, and the duck box report. We wrote a test this morning that was on tree identification. We had to explain things like the difference between coniferous and deciduous trees and how to identify the type of tree by certain markings.
