TX - Galveston's Dead Trees May Help Repair Ship

Instead of a date with a dump, live oaks killed by Hurricane Ike in Galveston may get an unusual second lease on life

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Galveston's Dead Trees May Help Repair Ship

City searches for places to send dead oaks other than the landfill

By HARVEY RICE Houston Chonicle
July 3, 2009

Caption: Mystic Seaport The last wooden whaling ship, the Charles W. Morgan, could get 176 tons of oak for repairs in Mystic, Conn.

GALVESTON Instead of a date with a dump, live oaks killed by Hurricane Ike in Galveston may get an unusual second lease on life.

Some of the trees might be used to refurbish the worlds only remaining wooden whaling ship. The Mystic Seaport maritime museum is hoping to haul six to eight truckloads about 176 tons of live oak from Galveston to the museum in Mystic, Conn., where it is rebuilding the 1841 whaling ship Charles W. Morgan, said Quentin Snediker, director of the museum shipyard.

As much as the city welcomes the museums interest in taking away the wood, the 176 tons will barely make a dent in the estimated 40,000 dead trees killed by Ike that must be cut down and disposed of by Sept. 12 to qualify for federal reimbursement.

The city is struggling to find ways to dispose of the mountains of wood that will be cut down, but options are few. Another problem is convincing property owners that their dead trees victims of saltwater storm surge must be cut before they become a safety hazard.

City spokeswoman Alicia Cahill said many owners still cling to a myth that the trees will revive after a couple of years. There are a lot of people emotionally attached to these trees, she said.

A Texas Forest sample survey estimated about 10,000 dead trees are in the public right of way and about 30,000 on private property. The number of dead trees for the city is so great that a U.S. Forest Service official called it an eco-disaster.

The city lost 50 percent of its leaf canopy, said Pete Smith, Texas Forest Service staff urban forester.

It represented the cooling canopy over the city and to lose half is incredibly significant, Smith said.

Cost of transportation
Finding a use for the trees to avoid dumping them in the county landfill has proved vexing.

A drop in lumber prices makes it difficult to give wood away, said Edward Dougal, Texas Forest Service wood utilization and marketing specialist. The biggest cost is transportation, Dougal said, which few companies are willing to pay.

Mystic Seaport, for example, will pay $6,000 per truckload to haul the live oaks to Connecticut.

Cahill said Galveston has looked at experimental uses, but none has proven doable so far. The city, for instance, considered a new technology known as biochar, a process for capturing the carbon and producing an especially dense charcoal. In Australia, biochar is used to condition dry soils.

Houston disposed of 5.4 million cubic yards of waste after the storm, 3.9 million of it from vegetation, but sent none of its vegetation waste to the landfill, said Marina Joseph, spokeswoman for Houstons Solid Waste Management Department. Instead, the city paid contractors to turn the waste into mulch and compost that was sold at local stores, Joseph said.

Houston paid contractors such as Living Earth Technologies, based in Dallas, $12.70 per ton to turn waste into mulch, much cheaper than the $33 per ton cost of putting the waste in a landfill, said company president Mark Rose.

The comparison is difficult, however, because Houston figures show that the city cut down only slightly more than 3,000 trees.

Most of the vegetation was picked up on the curb side or trimmed from trees, Joseph said.

But Galveston, strapped for cash while trying to rebuild from the storm, is looking for someone to take the wood at no cost to the city.

If we had somebody to work with who would accept our material, we would jump at the chance, Cahill said.

The Sept. 12 deadline is the last day that the Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay 100 percent of the cost of removing the thousands of trees, which will become about 2 million cubic yards of waste.

Many trees 100 years old
The trees to be removed include many of the century-old oaks that line Broadway, the entrance to the city and its main thoroughfare, said Michael Merritt, Texas Forest Service Bayou Region urban forestry coordinator. Many of the dead and dying trees were planted after the Great 1900 Storm, which killed at least 6,000 people and remains the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history.

The contractor hired to cut down the trees assured the city that the trees can be removed by the deadline, Cahill said.

FEMA will pay to transport the wood to the county landfill but wont pay to have it taken farther, Cahill said.

Galveston homeowners seeking information about getting their dead trees removed should call Beck Disaster Recovery at 409-974-4243.

Additional Information

Web Site: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6510492.html

Category: Forestry>Wood Utilization

Region: Texas

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