Ice storm damage lingers in forests

By Carolyn Y. Johnson
Globe Staff

The Dec. 11-12 ice storm that knocked out power in 326,000 Massachusetts homes also left its mark on area forests, say state officials who are still surveying the damage.

Thousands of trees have lost their crowns, and several state parks have been closed because of dangerous conditions, officials say. The state has already spent $3.9 million on debris removal, according to Rick Sullivan, commissioner of the state Department of Conservation and Recreation.

"The full effect probably isn't going to be known until later in the spring when the snow melts," Sullivan said. "We'll be able to be out there and more aggressive in terms of the clean-up," which could take a year.

The ice storm was the worst to hit the area in a decade, Sullivan said. Other officials noted that it paled in comparison to the 1998 ice storm, which struck farther north and caused extensive forest damage.

Still, in southern New Hampshire, some maple syrup producers suffered greatly in this latest ice storm, according to Barbara Lassonde, publicist for the New Hampshire Maple Producers' Association. For example, one maple syrup producer in Temple with 4,500 taps last spring said he would only get 500 taps this season, and is looking for another orchard.

"This is devastating to that part of the state that was hit the hardest," Lassonde said.

Overall, a post-storm aerial survey in New Hampshire found very little serious damage there, according to Kyle Lombard, forest entomologist for the New Hampshire Division of Forests and Lands.

"It just wasn't severe enough to the forest in general to be a big forest health issue," Lombard said. He noted that the one area in which severe damage did appear to occur, with more than half of the trees' crowns breaking off, was in the Jaffrey area.

Ice storms are a natural occurrence, and forestry officials said that long-term detrimental impacts on forest health are not expected. Still, the tree damage makes forests more vulnerable.

"You don't have to go too far to find trees just snapped off. A lot of other trees lost major branches high up and they're damaged," said Robert Childs, an entomologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "Any time a tree is broken like that it just opens the tree to these invaders -- fungi, beetles -- that contribute to the demise of the trees."

The storm was yet another hit on the trees of Worcester and several surrounding towns, which have been under a quarantine since the destructive Asian Longhorned Beetle was first discovered in the area this summer. To stop the beetle from spreading, no wood may be transported out of a 63-square-mile area, and fallen tree branches are brought to a central processing facility to be turned into wood chips.

Several forestry officials noted that while the impact on man-made infrastructure was huge, with some communities losing power for nearly two weeks, the storm's impact on forests paled in comparison to the last storm to strike New England a decade ago. That storm hit further north than the latest one, and coated 25 million acres of forest with ice and mowed down large swaths of trees.

That storm provided a laboratory to better understand the impacts of devastating storms -- and showed that overall, forests recover, said Charles Levesque, executive director of the North East State Foresters Association.

"The long-term damage as a result of the '98 storm was not nearly what people had predicted; I've been in places where I was there firsthand," Levesque said. "The damage was terrible -- and those forests are still there."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.