Maine Bans importation of firewood

FYI, what was considered good practice is now the law in Maine

Gov. John Baldacci has signed into law a bill barring importation of firewood into Maine from other states.

The purpose of the ban is to protect Maine's hardwood trees from the spread of the Asian longhorned beetle and the emerald ash borer. Destruction of trees by those insects could hurt wood-products industries that employ thousands of Mainers.

The bill's sponsor, Democratic Rep. Jeff McCabe of Skowhegan, says the problem insect has been found in neighboring states and across the country. Baldacci signed the bill Thursday.

As amended, the bill does not include wood chips, wood pellets, fuel for biomass boilers, pulpwood or other wood sold or transported for manufacturing purposes.

So now that Maine and New Hampshire ban out of state wood can we form a compact and bring wood between the two? I've got more campwood than you can shake a stick at out back but end up using pallets for car camping.

I don't often speak up here, but this is about the silliest I've seen.


Enforcement? Who, what, why, where , when? ? Any enforcement is going to come down on the casual tourist, because vast cubic yds /linear ft and metric tonnes of pulpwood come into Maine on a daily basis from several directions. Rt 2, Rt 26, and Rt 17 are my sightlines.

Hahaha, I live in West Bethel, ME. I can contract with a number of local cordwood dealers to supply me with firewood, but I don't need an active imagination to know that some of that wood might be harvested over the state line... the harvester may own wood lot in NH, or may have harvest rights through the BLM or have contractual woodlot harvest rights with a NH wood-lot owner on the Gilead/Shelburne interface.

Targeting this law to the casual user, and totally forgiving the industrial transport modality, is a joke. Asian Long-horn beetle and Emerald Ash Borer are already here in Maine.

Who is going to stake out every honor system camp-wood stand and require a written receipt and proof of provenance for campfire wood?

Puleeze. Yank my other leg, there might be bell attached.

Breeze

Video

Here is a decent video produced by a friend of mine on this threat. It has some identification aids and ideas for what we call all do to try and stop this threat. Assistance by people who spend time in the woods is very important.

http://vimeo.com/8981916

Breeze said:

I don't often speak up here, but this is about the silliest I've seen.


Enforcement? Who, what, why, where , when? ? Any enforcement is going to come down on the casual tourist, because vast cubic yds /linear ft and metric tonnes of pulpwood come into Maine on a daily basis from several directions. Rt 2, Rt 26, and Rt 17 are my sightlines.

Hahaha, I live in West Bethel, ME. I can contract with a number of local cordwood dealers to supply me with firewood, but I don't need an active imagination to know that some of that wood might be harvested over the state line... the harvester may own wood lot in NH, or may have harvest rights through the BLM or have contractual woodlot harvest rights with a NH wood-lot owner on the Gilead/Shelburne interface.

Targeting this law to the casual user, and totally forgiving the industrial transport modality, is a joke. Asian Long-horn beetle and Emerald Ash Borer are already here in Maine.

Who is going to stake out every honor system camp-wood stand and require a written receipt and proof of provenance for campfire wood?

Puleeze. Yank my other leg, there might be bell attached.

Breeze

Click to expand...

The ban is on firewood, not wood to be used for industrial purposes. Firewood is especially an issue because people often do not use all of it, or leave it stacked for extended periods of time, allowing more opportunities for invasive insects inside the wood to escape and move into the region.

Wood being used for commercial wood products goes straight to the mill, and is usually treated pretty quickly, killing anything inside of it. Furthermore, trees that have been affected by invasive insects are usually diseased or dead, and are useless for commercial uses, but still make good firewood, and are more likely to be utilized as such.

These bans aren't unheard of, in NYC there is currently a quarantine prohibiting the removal of any wood from the island of Manhattan. Yes, it is difficult to enforce, but making the ban into a law also has the added effect of making more people aware of the dangers of inadvertently transporting wood containing invasive insects.

"Wood being used for commercial wood products goes straight to the mill, and is usually treated pretty quickly, killing anything inside of it. Furthermore, trees that have been affected by invasive insects are usually diseased or dead, and are useless for commercial uses, but still make good firewood, and are more likely to be utilized as such."

Sorry, but that is definitely not the case in this area of ME/NH. It does NOT go straight to the paper mill, it sits in log yards waiting to be chipped, and that time frame is months, not days. Once chipped, it is then trucked to the actual paper mill, stored on site in the chip-pile, and conveyed into the liquor-tanks as needed.

There are huge yards of pulpwood at the chipping plant on Rt 2 in Shelburne NH, in an adjacent log yard on the east side of Moose Pond in Shelburne NH, and at the chipping plant in West Paris ME. This is tree-length, stacked as high as a pulp-truck cherry-picker can reach ( 30+ feet) and the yards encompass acres and acres of land.

Who is going to stop the tourist hauling a 5th wheel travel trailer who is carrying a few dozen sticks of camp-wood? Where is this going to happen? Is there going to be a "wood dump" at the York Toll Booth?

If you buy campwood from a road side stand in Gorham NH planning to use it at a campground in Shelburne but instead end up camping at Basin or Hastings in Evans Notch, will you be directed to take your wood back to NH, and if so, where will it be disposed of safely?

Will campground owners be required to refuse sites to those arriving with their own firewood?

Education is a good thing, and I totally agree that the spread of invasive insects is to be avoided. This law is certainly good publicity about the problem, but enforcement will be negligible.

Breeze

Breeze said:

This law is certainly good publicity about the problem, but enforcement will be negligible.

Breeze

Click to expand...

I'm hoping that just by having campground rangers/owners telling people they can't use their firewood will be enough to slow or stop the spread. If announcements/signs are posted all over trail billboards & campground facilities, the awareness of the issue will grow expontentially. Enforcement will be tough, as you said, but that's not really the point of the law I'm guessing.

It's already working. here we are talking about it. A lot of folks who didn't know about the issue now know about.

There are always going to be people who don't care or think it doesn't apply to them but no effort is going to cure that problem. This kind of effort minimizes the spread or more likely buys some time.

Go ahead, Breeze. Get upset and tell everyone you know about how crazy this law is - that way even more people will know about it. Some will ignore it and some will decide to leave their wood at home.

that's getting the word out...

The most effective way to make this happen in campgrounds is to increase the price of a campsite a few dollars to provide local firewood as part of the site. The price increase probably would not have much effect on traffic, and most people would not want to bother loading and hauling wood if they were already paying for wood at the campground.

Also - one big problem I've had with campground wood is it is wet and/or junk a lot of the time.

I camped at maybe 20 different campgrounds in New England last spring & summer, and probably 1/2 provided inadequate firewood. Sometimes the wood was very wet, sometimes it was too fresh, sometimes it was all softwood and burned in about 15 minutes .

Hopefully since local firewood is now required in so many different places (i.e. MA, ME), campground operators will ensure it's good enough quality.

Last year when we received cofirmation of our Baxter State Park reservations it included a request to not bring firewood from outside Maine. I suspect that continues and will now state it as a requirement.

No laws can be regularly enforced. Doesn't mean they shouldn't be laws if a good idea. There has to be some presumption just by having them that the good folks of the USA and Canada will make some effort to comply........

Breeze,

I could be wrong, but I think the problem is not wood going between ME/NH, but wood coming from areas further away -- the places (like NY and Mass) where the emerald ash borer and Asian longhorn beetle are currently found.

If the pest is in the woods outside Berlin, and someone cuts it and trucks it to West Bethel, big whooping deal. That pest was probably going to move there anyway. On the other hand, right now I doubt many (if any) places in Maine are trucking in wood from New York, Ohio, or Worcester, Mass. A small bundle of camp firewood might move that far, though. That gives the pests a good head start over other means of transport, I'd say.

cushetunk said:

I doubt many (if any) places in Maine are trucking in wood from New York, Ohio, or Worcester, Mass. A small bundle of camp firewood might move that far, though.

Click to expand...

Apparently one issue is people who live near Worcester and have cottages or seasonal campsites in ME such as Belgrade Lakes area. Firewood is cheap in Worcester (!) so they bring up a trailer load for the summer which sits outside.

I am a very curous on Breezy's source for the statement that

Asian Long-horn beetle and Emerald Ash Borer are already here in Maine.

I was aware that there were attempts to track down people from ALB impacted areas who camped in Maine by tracking down campground registrations, but didnt know they had found any active infestations in Maine. Given the extreme measures the USDA uses to control an infestation when one is located for ALB, I am quite surprised that the Maine infestation didnt get a lot of press. Beyond quarantines, I am not aware of any viable means of preventing the spread of EAB and therefore, a Maine infestation may not have gotten as much press.

Last thing I knew EAB had reached western and central New York but also wasnt aware that it had jumped lake champlain, Vermont and NH to land in Maine.

ALB is at least possible to control with agressive means, but most of what I have read is that the EAB is a given and will wipe out the ash population in the northeast barring the invention of some sort of treatment.

I look forward to hearing about the source for information on the Maine infestations

The possible infestation is scary. I'm sorry but anything that can be done to get the word out and stop the spread is a good measure in my book. As peakbagger says - "it's good practice" anyway. The Maine Forest Service website states that for the EAB **Many new infestations center around campgrounds, implicating camp firewood in this insect’s spread**. There is nothing on the website about either insect being in Maine.

This whole wood importation issue upset me so much that I thought about doing drugs.Upon further investigation it turns out that drugs are outlawed and can no longer be obtained.Darn.
You can't legislate human nature.If you don't want people transporting wood to Maine then make the local stuff reasonable.As long as Cumberland Farms and the other local businesses are willing to soak the tourists 10 or 15 bucks for a bundle of twigs then screw them and their Asian bugs.

If I recall, the Asian longhorn beetle is believed to come to the US in wooden pallets. Will Maine also not allow shipments of goods on wooden pallets into Maine?

Its population has also exploded in its native China. Sounds like the natural predator(s) population might have declined or even worse disappeared. If that is so introducing a biological control sounds very unlikely.

It's time for another firewood exchange in Kittery, Maine.

spencer said:

It's already working. here we are talking about it. A lot of folks who didn't know about the issue now know about.

There are always going to be people who don't care or think it doesn't apply to them but no effort is going to cure that problem. This kind of effort minimizes the spread or more likely buys some time.

Go ahead, Breeze. Get upset and tell everyone you know about how crazy this law is - that way even more people will know about it. Some will ignore it and some will decide to leave their wood at home.

that's getting the word out...

Click to expand...

Snaps for you, Spencer, right on. This is an education -- not enforcement -- issue. The big gub'mint is not the essence here.

I ain't no fan of nanny, but I'd really like to see what the forests would have looked like with elm and chestnut in them. We have a problem here that could mean an equally dramatic shift in the east's forests, and (if something is to be done about it) now is the time. Some quarantines should be compelling, eh? I think it's a real problem, human-influenced and human-fixable. Shouldn't we try?

Good stuff (but political, watch out)!

--Mike.

brianW said:

If I recall, the Asian longhorn beetle is believed to come to the US in wooden pallets. Will Maine also not allow shipments of goods on wooden pallets into Maine?

Its population has also exploded in its native China. Sounds like the natural predator(s) population might have declined or even worse disappeared. If that is so introducing a biological control sounds very unlikely.

Click to expand...

All pallets now need to use treated lumber.