The Yang Bay Tourist Park, named after the waterfall, occupies 570 hectares in the forest of Khanh Vinh District’s Khanh Phu Commune.
Loggers from outside the commune have been visiting the forest regularly since early this year.
Vo Viet Truc, chief forest warden of Khanh Vinh District, said loggers mostly cut down big and rare trees using chain saws.
| forest destruction could ruin the Yang Ly waterfall, a popular attraction. Local rangers say they do not have the resources to tackle the problem. |
The district forest management on Tuesday inspected the forest with officials from three units that manage the forest – Khanh Phu Commune administration, Yang Bay Tourist Park and Khanh Hoa Forest Products Company – to find many tree stumps.
Truc said the district forest rangers were yet to find out a solution to stop the logging practice.
He offered the excuse that 22 rangers of the district forest management can hardly keep control over more than 90,000 hectares of the forest, given poor equipment and means of transport.
Truc said the loggers make good use of watchmen and cell phones and always know the whereabouts of rangers instead of the other way round.
Loggers hired locals to carry the timber out of the commune both on road and in the river.
“Upon seeing the rangers, loggers will throw the wood down on the road as an obstacle, or sink the logs into the river to hide them,” Truc said.
“Thus officials rarely succeed in catching them.”
Le Cong Ra, director of the Yang Bay Tourist Park, said he and his subordinates “are very worried knowing that loggers are destroying the forest in the upper part of the Yang Bay Fall.”
The waterfall, two kilometers long and 80 meters high, attracts a large number of tourists.
Ra said loss of the trees in the forest will adversely affect the ecological environment and result in natural disasters such as floods, storms and drought that affect the flow to the waterfall.
“There’s a very high chance that we’ll lose the entire tourist park due to the logging,” he said.
Ra was the one that reported the illegal logging to local forest rangers after noting the first loggers in the area this January.
On the night of February 28, after his information helped officials seize more than two cubic meters of timber, Ra received unidentified calls threatening “I’ll kill you if you keep butting into in my business.”
In related news, forest rangers in Da Nang City’s Lien Chieu District on Wednesday and Thursday allowed local constructors to take forest land without notice to authorities so that they would help them build a road into the forest.
Early this year the district administration ordered the rangers to build a road more than one kilometer long and 5.5 meters wide as planned since 1999.
But the rangers were short of funds, so they asked the contractor of another project to build the road for them and paid the contractor with land worth VND250 million (US$14,300), the district’s chief ranger Tran Van Ha said.
Lien Chieu District People’s Committee has required the forest management to explain the incident by Monday.
Reported by Van Ky – Vu Phuong Thao
0 nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét