Europe's Trees Battered - Brief Article

American Forests, Spring, 2000

It should have been a regular trip. But when Parisian train conductor Jean Michel Gauthier felt his train shaking furiously as it made its way along the tracks, he knew right away "something big was happening."

"I had to stop because I saw roofs and trees on the railroad tracks," Gauthier wrote via e-mail. "Five passengers and I tried to lift the debris off the tracks, but one tree was too large and heavy. I sat on that train for 15 hours without moving because of the storm."

Gauthier was lucky. More than 140 people perished last December during two of the most severe windstorms to hit western Europe in recent memory. Millions of trees fell as 100 to 120 mile-per-hour winds battered France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Britain, Spain, and Italy. Many of the dead had been hit by tree branches, according to The Washington Post.

Hurricane-force winds toppled an estimated 10,000 trees at Versailles, the historic palace and gardens of King Louis XIV About 9 million tourists travel annually to the 2,000-acre site, once landscaped with single and double rows of carefully pruned linden and beech trees. The storm destroyed many of the oak, ash, beech, and cherry that populate the grounds.

"It was like the apocalypse," Alain Baraton, the head gardener, told The Associated Press. "In one hour, 200 years of trees were destroyed."

Among the victims: a tulip poplar imported from Virginia for Marie Antoinette and a Corsican pine planted under Napoleon's orders.

Preliminary cleanup efforts, including cutting, burning, and removing damaged trees, will cost up to $3 million, according to Chateau President Hubert Astier. Tree planting and other long-term restoration at the site could cost $31 million. Although many of Versailles' downed trees stood up to 130 feet tall, the Chateau plans to plant smaller ones--about 30 feet tall--this time around.

"Some of the trees were old and sick," Astier told AP. "They weren't made to resist winds like that. The new trees will be lower."

French authorities called the country-wide damage "a catastrophe for our plant heritage," according to the Post. But other countries face an equally uncertain fate. In Switzerland the storm downed about 8.4 million cubic meters of trees, equaling two year's worth of timber harvests for that nation, according to the country's environmental agency. Such startling numbers could cause fluctuations in the timber markets, threaten overall forest health, and imperil wildlife, said the United Nation's Economic Commission for Europe (ECE).

But Gauthier and wife Carol said they don't need time to assess the extent of the damage.

"Two days [after the storm] we went for a walk in the Bois de Vicennes, a big park nearby, and it seemed as though every other tree was on the ground," she said. "It looked like a bomb had gone off. It saddened us and reminded us how strong Mother Nature can be."