NORWICH – This time around, it’s going to be the ash tree. Like Dutch Elm Disease and the Chestnut blight during the middle of the last century, experts say an exotic beetle from Asia is expected to completely obliterate the state’s forest of ash.
“In all likelihood, there’s a good chance ash will be banished from the state’s forest,” Rich Taber, a Cornell Cooperative Extension forester for Broome and Chenango counties, told members of the Chenango County Agriculture, Buildings and Grounds Committee Tuesday.
There is no natural predator or cure, he added.
Taber said forestry management experts have quarantined the distribution of firewood in New York’s neighboring states, hoping to contain what’s called the Emerald Ash Borer. However, it could take just one load of infested firewood to transport the deadly pest into New York. The borer has been moving throughout the Great Lakes states, and is only 150 miles from New York’s boarder.
The Emerald Ash Borer, first discovered in southeastern Michigan in 2002, eats out the center of a tree’s trunk and limbs and kills a tree within four years. More than 3,000 square miles in Michigan are currently infested, and more than 5 million ash trees are dead or dying. The pest has entered Ohio and Ontario, Canada, and has been detected in ash nursery trees in Maryland and Virginia.
Moving firewood has become such a deadly threat to forests that regulators in Michigan have instituted a $250,000 fine and a year in jail for moving ash firewood out of a quarantined area.
Town of Preston Supervisor Peter C. Flanagan, who manages a woodlot, predicted that New York state regulators will quarantine ash in five years.
“If you are thinking about cutting firewood from ash to sell it, you might not be able to,” he cautioned. Flanagan also recommended that individuals – even those with forestry management plans – consider cutting mature ash while they still have market value.
Taber said local municipalities should be ready to clean up the devastation after it occurs. The invasion has already cost the states of Michigan and Ohio about $1 million to clean-up.
“In municipalities, it will cost about $1,000 to remove an affected tree from a residential area,” he said.
Ash grows best in wide open landscapes and has already suffered from the crowded, Civil War-era forests that dominate 60 percent of Broome and Chenango counties. The tent and Eastern caterpillar has threatened the species and others this spring. But unlike the ash borer, the caterpillars are native, cyclical species that will eventually be eaten by birds, Taber said.
“This is pretty scary,” City of Norwich Supervisor Linda E. Natoli said. “Ash is a big resource here.”
Acting on a suggestion from the Preston supervisor, Committee Chairman Robert Briggs said he would contact the county’s consulting forester to target any ash trees in county-owned forests.