Northeast Ice Storm Ravaged 38,000 Square Miles Of Woodland

Surveys released Wednesday at a forestry conference indicate at least 38,000 square miles of woodland were damaged during January’s catastrophic ice storm in eastern Canada and northern New England.

Barbara Burns of Vermont’s forest department and Bruce Pendrel of the Canadian Forest Service said the damage is variable and spotty but the hardest hit areas are in Quebec, Ontario and Maine.

Burns said the most severe losses are in hardwood stands, notably birch, poplar and maple.

“The conifers, because of the way they’re shaped, didn’t break as much,” said Burns. “There’s a lot of breakage in the tops of hardwood trees. Fortunately the trees were really healthy going into this winter and we expect a lot of trees with lighter levels of damage will recover.”

Burns said maple syrup production will be down in places like Vermont and Quebec.

“There’s not only concern about the health of the maple trees but getting around in the woods is very difficult and even dangerous,” she said.

She said people should be cautious before heading out with chain saws to remove trees that look dead or dying. They said they could bounce back in the spring.

“Conifers have evolved to be able to take it and in fact the trees most heavily affected, the birches and the poplars, those species grow very quickly and their role in the ecological system is to die and break early on in their life. But the impact will certainly change the forest because it has occurred over such a wide area.”