Tens of thousands of trees in northern Wisconsin, many in Langlade and Oconto counties, are being cleaned up following severe storms recently and professional loggers have been called to help.
Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association Director Henry Schienebeck says their members and others were called on quickly to help....
"...Right now we have four of the master loggers down there that have contracts directly with townships to open their roads up and get them cleared. I talked with one of our members this morning and he said it's been going really good. He reported in the Town of Lily(Langlade county) it took them almost six days to get 26 miles of roads open..."
Schienebeck says while much of the focus on the cleanup has been on public lands, he says private landowners also were hurt...
"The impact this has on individual landowners. There's a focus on state, county and DNR land, but I know we have one landowner over there, a logging company that has about 640 acres that got flattened. They were planning on sustainably managing that over a number of years, and that's flat..."
He says some wood loses its value when exposed to the elements. Schienebeck says it's much more difficult to clean up a blown down sections of trees than one would think. He says it can be dangerous, even for people in mechanical harvesters, and it often takes twice as long as it would under normal conditions.
Schienebeck says it could be at least a couple of years before all the wood is cleaned up.
