The clear-up
On the public forest estate the key challenges were across the East of England and the South East. Much of the worst damage occurred in the timber forests, where conifer plantations did not have the root system to stand up to the extreme winds. In Suffolk, an unprecedented challenge faced foresters, and with much of the timber being pine the race was on to recover the wood before it was damaged by bark beetles and fungi, which would make it unsaleable. At Rendlesham there were 400,000 felled trees, at Tunstall 300,000 and 260,000 at Dunwich - 475,000 cubic metres all requiring clearing - equivalent to 13 years wood supply all at once - enough to fill 130 Olympic swimming pools. One hundred and eighty men were brought in by coach every day for 18 months to clear the site. Almost all of the timber was cut manually with chainsaws and removed by forwarders fitted with hydraulic cranes for loading and unloading. It is estimated that 175,000 lorries were loaded up with timber – the lorries lorries would have stretched from Cambridge to Newcastle. Meanwhile, in the Weald, forester Norman Day oversaw the clear-up in Commission woods in Kent and Sussex. "Travelling any distance at that time was out of the question but we managed to get teams together at various locations to make a start clearing roads and tracks - a process which was to last six weeks! "Over the next two and a half years we did nothing other than clear windblown woodlands. After an initial survey it was recognised a major operation was needed to make any inroads into the problem. To put things in context the annual harvest in my district had been in the region of 25-30,000 cubic metres per annum; the estimate for the blown timber on the estate was 350,000 cubic metres. "Machinery was purchased, teams drawn together from all over Britain and put to work clearing the land and dispatching the timber. We worked double shifts for between 20 and 25 days at a time, then sent the men home for a week which gave us a chance to catch up on the paperwork. It was fast, furious and relentless but we had an excellent team who pulled together and eventually won through."
One of the key questions the Forestry Commission faced, was what to do with the timber. << Previous page | Next page >>
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