Posted on 10/10/2005 3:34:45 PM PDT by Libloather
Hurricane-Felled Timber Worth Billions
United Press International
U.S. timber companies are scrambling to harvest tons of timber felled by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
The companies are moving as quickly as possible to recover the millions of trees before they rot, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
Industry analysts estimate that more than 20 billion board feet are down, enough to build 1 million houses.
Timber down in Louisiana is worth $900 million; in Mississippi, the felled timber is worth $2.4 billion, experts estimate.
It's an open forum.
You have a great day too.
Sounds great to me.
[[Where are all the environmentalist protesters like we have in the Northwest USA when there is a big fire with acres of salvageable timber. No fair. I want to see a protestor named "polecat" climb a pile of timber and chain his filthy body to it.]]
Surely you jest ;) Those trees are in stomp jumpin territory (redneck for loggers). The log trucks are full and running. They have hit the mother lode.
My cousin had a woody few acres and she has maybe 5 trees still standing. My trees did fine, but the neighbors trees took out my fence and fell in my yard. They missed the house so I'm not complaining.
An oak fell on my uncle's house and the root base was taller than the house. I'm talking huge old oaks and pines down everywhere you look. My once shady and woodsy town is too bright and sunny now. It was bad here. There's hardly any trees left.
Some company also contracted to salvage timber for $1 million..
They are "pelletizing" it for use in home furnaces and in electrical generation facilities..(coal fired)
It seems that mixing pelletized wood with coal creates a hotter, cleaner burning mixture..
This results in lower costs, less pollution, and more energy for the dollar..
There is no reason to let any of it go to waste.
Nope. On packages of meat.
In the South....someone would throw a match on the pile... just to make it worth his while. :)
My prediction: we will start to see made-in-China prefab house components.
Cereal boxes!
My relatives said that most mills have stopped taking timber from private individuals, unless they personaly know and trust the man delivering the logs to the mill. Too many of the logs that were blown down, were from people's yards or fence lines and carry the danger of having nails, or dog chains grown into them. This is a terrible danger to the man running the saw-mill. If timber is salvaged from a suspected area, then it usually goes for chip-board, or particle-board, or whole tree pulp-wood. The end result is that blown down trees have about a 50 percent chance of being not usable for lumber, since the bending of the tree in the strong wind usually tears them up on the inside. If you cut them into shorter 8 or 10 foot logs, some will break apart down the middle, from the bending of several different directions from the wind, before the hurricane stops. And then there's tornado damage to a lot of the timber, which normally snaps the trees off above the ground, or blows them down in many different dirrections in a small area. Tornado damage makes it very difficult to get to the base of the trees to cut them up, and makes it hard to load them. In some areas, log roads had to be built where the rain washed out the roads.
So when you see lumber prices rise, don't think the money is getting to the one who owned the timber. Some people are having to pay $400.00 a tree to get them removed. But the poor land owners in the country, ... most are cutting the damaged timber up themselves, and paying someone to come and take the trees to the mill. If the bark falls off the trees, from waiting too long to take them to market, the mill won't take them. If a log is over 30 inches in diameter, the mill won't take it, because their equipment can't handle it. A lot of trees will rot where they fell, and most will get burned this fall, either in the fields where they lay, or for fire wood if they aren't pine. That's about all alot of that pine is good for, rotting to make topsoil. 150 miles inland around Newton, Mississippi, alot of the old close-grained pines are laying on the ground. It's going to make good termite food.
I know many people who lost a lot of good timber to those hurricanes, and the new hybrid pines are glorified milkweeds. They grow twice as fast as the close grain pines, but weigh less than half the weight of the old pines. The new pines aren't worth anything except for pulp wood for paper, or chip or particle board.
It's bad all the way around. Two days of work cutting up a load of logs (between 16 to 18 tons) and paying for someone to deliver them to the mill ($100.00 to $140.00) after taxes might bring about $400.00. Then you get to pay for your fuel, maintain your chain saw, buy mosquito repellant, and pay for the fuel the tractor uses to clean up the mess from the limbs that were left from the logs. But ... you can't beat the work-out for exercise.
I wonder how much of the Natchez Trace Parkway is open, and how much of that beautiful timber isn't there any more?
"Contrast this with the timber felled by Mount St. Helens. There the enviros would not let the felled timber be harvested so they let it rot in place instead."
Correction: I was working as a timber faller in No. CA at the time. ST Helens went off three weeks before my wedding day or I would have joined my fellow cutters that were called to go up to WA state and cut downed timber.
The ash took a terrible toil on the saws and the men. Chains were thrown away after a few minutes work. The logs were filled with mud and rocks. All trees that could be harvested were taken. Most were hauled out by Helicopter crews due to the lack of logging roads.
Quote from previous link to article.......
"The largest Pacific Northwest salvage effort of the past quarter-century occurred after the eruption of Mount St. Helens, when loggers over a period of years cut more than 1 billion board feet of timber affected by the 1980 blast."
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