EDMONTON — An army of 600 workers is busy in Alberta forests in the latest campaign against the tree-killing mountain pine beetle.
The crews are fanning out into a key area between Grande Prairie, Hinton, and Slave Lake in west central Alberta where the beetles are in the greatest danger of spreading east.
The goal of the contact workers is to cut and burn 170,000 infested trees by the end of March.
Duncan MacDonnell, a spokesman for Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, says each beetle-infested pine tree contains enough larva to infest 10 more trees this summer.
He says if the $15 million campaign is successful, the crews could save 1.7 million trees from the bugs.
Experts estimates the beetles threaten six million hectares of Alberta forest containing pine trees.