| Rita rakes LA, Etex
forests With the Southern timber industry barely organized to begin the salvage of massive losses of standing timber caused by winds from Hurricane Katrina in southeast Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the East Texas and Western Louisiana timber belt wound up in the bulls-eye of the slightly less powerful Hurricane Rita. Striking land on the Texas-Louisiana coastal area between Beaumont, Texas and Lake Charles, Louisiana in the early hours of Saturday, September 24, the Rita storm, downsized to a Category 2, began dumping torrential rains accompanied by winds up to 100-miles-per-hour. The three Texas counties of Jasper, Tyler, and Polk, and the Louisiana parishes of Beauregard, Vernon, and Sabine, all lying due north and northwest of the landfall area, are major producers of commercial timber in one of the most densely forested and intensively managed regions on the entire Gulf Coast. As this story was being prepared before 7 a.m. on September 24, police radio broadcasts in the background were reporting downed trees on highways, some involving electric power lines, as far away from us as 30-40 miles south, and as close as a mile from The Piney Woods Journal office, located on U.S. Highway 167 in Winn Parish, Louisiana, about 200 miles from the Gulf coast where the wide-ranging Rita spuns away. Thus, the prospect of major timber damage is quite real in the East Texas/Western Louisiana timber region lying on either side of the Sabine River boundary. According to wire service reports available to The Journal, Rita downed trees, sparked fires across the hurricane zone, and swamped Louisiana shoreline townes with a 15-foot storm surge that required boat and helicopter rescues of hundreds of people. A Jasper County law enforcement officer involved in search and rescue in the East Texas piney woods area, said, "There are almost as many trees down as there are standing." According to "Harvest Trends 2003," an economic impact report by the Texas Forest Service, Texas A&M University, the three adjacent counties of Jasper, Tyler, and Polk produced pine and hardwood timber equal to 22 percent of the entire Texas harvest volume of 668,264,790 cubic feet of combined pine and hardwood timber. The East Texas timber production is concentrated in the 43 counties from the Gulf coast north to the Oklahoma border, and not much further west than Interstate 45 between Houston and Dallas. Jasper county, of which the city of Jasper is the seat, was the top timber producing county in Texas according to the 2003 economic study, with 49,593,442 cubic feet of commercial timber harvested. That figure included 44.7 million cubic feet of pine, and 4.8 million cubic feet of hardwood, all of which had a total stumpage value of $53,160,000. Polk county, Livingston, harvested 48,508,032 cubic feet, valued at $59,903,000. Tyler county, Woodville, harvested 48,247,780 cubic feet, valued at $54,535,000. Other East Texas counties in the top ten group of
producers, are: On the Louisiana side, the adjacent parishes of Beauregard, Vernon, and Sabine produced a significant share of the 2003 Louisiana timber harvest, according to the annual Louisiana Summary of crops produced by the LSU AgCenter. Beauregard, DeRidder, harvested 82,705,609 board feet
of saw timber, and earned $61,136,571 in revenue. These and the other forest producing counties and parishes in Texas and Louisiana, produce annual revenues from stumpage in excess of $2 billion, with value added from manufactured forest products reaching in excess of $25 billion for the two-state area. Loss of significant portions of standing timber from hurricane wind damage in the southern Gulf Coast. |