I am writing in response to, and in support of the letter written by Reese Bull and printed in the Sunday, April 6, edition of The Roanoke Times ("More logging wrong for National Forests").
Hurricane Helene, along with several major wind events and the ice storm that many areas experienced last winter, brought down millions of trees in the Washington and Jefferson National Forests. Several thousand valuable timber species are just laying there, soon to rot. Other species with value to the furniture, cooperage, and other wood products industries await the same fate. Is anything being done to salvage this abundance of wealth and resources that Nature has unfortunately provided?
When logging happens, much of the environmental damage is done bulldozing roads into the forest to accommodate trucks and related heavy machinery. I have seen untold quantities of valuable lumber available in areas where no roads need to be built. The Creeper and New River trails, Mount Rogers NRA, Grindstone, Hurricane, and White Rocks Campgrounds — to name just a few of the facilities that I know of — are all closed because of storm damage.
Access to tons of mature, available timber is already in place; the roads exist, though some are themselves storm-damaged. Also, many of the roads and bridges are probably not rated to handle the gross vehicle weight of loaded semis in the first place. If Forest Service professionals were given the power to identify the areas where the trees could be removed with a minimum of environmental damage, then the process of harvesting this wood could get rolling.
I believe that this is an obvious win-win situation. Removing these trees could help with the cleanup and restoration efforts as well. A no-brainer. I truly hope that an effort is already underway to get a plan in place, set procedure, whatever. This is after all, the Federal Government, so things have a process; they take time to " get rolling ".
