Sixteen years ago, Hurricane Katrina damaged large timber on farms in Tangipahoa Parish. Hurricane Ida helped finish the job.
Gaston Lanaux III, of Husser, recalled how some 15-year-old trees survived Hurricane Katrina, only to be taken down pretty badly by Hurricane Ida as 30-year-old trees.
“Anything 15 years and up that was on commercial forest land that was planted and thinned before Ida hit, those stands have been pretty much totally devastated,” he said.
Lanaux, is a professional forester of 52 years, having spent 16 years with Crown Zellerbach in multiple capacities and 36 years after as an independent consulting forester. He is a lifetime board member of Louisiana Forestry Association and past board president of the association.
The damage during Hurricane Katrina was mainly to large timber, he said, and that storm blew large strands of large pine trees. Unlike with Katrina, during Ida, a lot of small scattered trees as well as big ones went down.
“The oak trees are very shallow-rooted trees. They don’t make a deep root system that would anchor them to the ground, so oak trees are extremely dangerous, particularly large oak trees with lot of foliage on them,” he said. “Katrina and Ida both hit before the trees shed their leaves for the winter, so it’s just like a big sail out there, and that’s why these oaks went over.”
“The pine trees, the ones that are really dangerous, are the big ones,” he added. “They get the right puff of wind or small touch-down tornado, and those trees go down.”
The ground was fairly dry and firm before Katrina hit. Although some were blown over, most trees snapped, he said.
“This time, the ground was so wet that they just fell over,” he said.
Before Hurricane Ida made landfall, 82 inches of rain had already fallen in the Husser area this year. Ida brought over 20 more inches of rain to Lanaux’s trees, bringing the amount of rain this year well over 100 inches for the year, he said.
Hurricane Nicholas added more water to the area this week, soaking the ground around the fallen trees and inside the holes the trees’ root balls had left.
He admitted to never seeing a year of rain like this in all the time he has been keeping records of rainfall. He started in 1991.
Whitney Wallace, associate agent of LSU AgCenter, said the damaging effects of Hurricane Ida’s winds on damage, mortality and recovery of tree populations is being assessed.
Wallace stressed that Tangipahoa Parish took its fair share of damage from Hurricane Ida, which caused widespread damage to urban and rural areas.
“The LSU AgCenter projects the biggest agricultural economic losses will be from downed timber and destroyed infrastructure,” she said. “Many state agencies along…
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