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Czechs could lose two-thirds of lumber crop

Windstorm casualties cause government and loggers to scramble

By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 31st, 2007 issue

When the winds came, the Czech Republic’s spruces, with their wide and shallow roots, didn’t stand a chance. The country’s forests and national parks are a wasteland, with trees snapped in half, ripped from the ground or splintered lengthwise down the stretch of their trunks.

According to the latest estimates, the windstorm that swept the country Jan. 19 and 20 — with winds peaking at 200 kilometers (125 miles) per hour in the mountains — killed or damaged 6.6 million trees, two-thirds of the country’s projected 2007 lumber harvest. And the winter weather that followed in the windstorm’s wake could put even more trees at risk.
“It’s been a harsh winter for the forests,” said Tomáš Vyšohlíd, spokesman for Lesy ČR, the state company that controls 50 percent of the country’s forests. “The wind has killed the mature trees and now the wet snow is threatening the young trees.”
While emergency logging began in private forests soon after the storm, Lesy ČR’s forests remained clear of the chainsaw’s whine, as they had been since Jan. 1. Thanks to an ongoing tender dispute between Lesy ČR and the Anti-Monopoly Office (ÚOHS), no one had been hired to do the job.
In response, Lesy ČR announced on Jan. 29 that it had struck a deal with the Agriculture Ministry that will allow the company to offer emergency short-term tenders for salvaging fallen wood on its land. Logging is expected to begin by Feb 5.
Five days earlier, the government declared a state of emergency in several critical forest regions: Vysočina, Karlovy Vary, Plzeň, South Moravia and Liberec.
Windfall
  • On Jan. 19 and 20, a windstorm swept through the country, knocking down and damaging an estimated two-thirds of the year's lumber crop. A tale of the tape:
  • 6.6 million number of trees killed or damaged
  • 50 percentage of country's forests
  • controlled by the state
  • 21 estimated number of days dead trees can sit before losing value
  • 16 days from the end of the storm before logging can begin
Source: Agriculture Ministry and Lesy ČR
The status lasts until Feb. 5 and limits forest access to loggers and state workers, which will allow the worst-damaged trees to be quickly removed and processed, said Hugo Roldan, spokesman for the Agriculture Ministry.
Haste is necessary because dead spruce trees — which make up 90 percent of the damaged crop — are extremely sensitive to two of the forest’s predators: the bark beetle and the wet cold of a Bohemian winter.
“With warm weather, the trees will last about three weeks before the bark beetles begin attacking,” said Roldan. Once beetles begin coring a tree with their larvae, the wood has little value.
Even if spared the beetle, wood begins to change color when exposed to the elements, particularly moisture. Blue and gray wood has little demand on the furniture or housing market.
Loggers hope to recover most of the country’s crop before it is ruined, but even if the salvaging operation is a complete success, much of the harvested wood will have lost some worth. Trees are most valuable when the first six meters of the trunk are harvested intact, and with many trees snapped in half or split down the center, there will be less income.
It’s unclear whether the price of lumber will rise because of the storm’s damage. Already the price of a meter of wood is 500 Kč ($23) higher than it was in December, but this increase, according to Vyšholíd, is due to artificial caps the industry kept on wood prices until they had an excuse for a hike: This month’s suspension in logging.

Contracted delays

In 2004 and 2005, the ÚOHS told Lesy ČR that the company, though it was state-owned, did not have to follow public tender laws. But when a new tender law came into effect this past summer, the ÚOHS had to amend its earlier decisions.
“They said, ‘Sorry, we made a mistake and your company does have to follow state tender laws,’ ” said Vyšohlíd.
The company filed tenders in the autumn, auctioning off one-year contracts to harvest trees from its lands. But after the bidding process was over, the losers had complaints.
“We consider these tenders not only nontransparent but also illegal,” said Roman Bajčan, chairman of the Association of Forestry Businesses (SPLH), representing 20 companies.
“We’re convinced that our price offered was fair, but I think nobody cared about the price in this case,” he said.
They filed a complaint with the ÚOHS, which the office is still investigating, according to ÚOHS spokesman Filip Vrána. Meanwhile, the 2007 contracts could not begin, and so logging ceased.
“Last year, when Lesy ČR called in its contracts, forestry companies had to fire 4,000 people,” said Bajčan. “We’re missing these people a lot.”
Hela Balínová contributed to this report.

Paul Voosen can be reached at pvoosen@praguepost.com


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