I spent a good portion of last Saturday winding my way back and forth across at least a halfdozen southeast Georgia counties battered by Hurricane Helene. I’d be driving along, thinking, this isn’t all that bad. Then I’d top a hill or round a bend and it was like I was on another planet.
Long stretches of fields, front yards and right-of-way would be piled with trees that had been blown down and then cut and stacked up, waiting for someone to come haul it off. Or huge stretches of pine forest would be flattened, the trees bent and broken like they had been crushed by God’s own boot.
The Georgia Forestry Commission and the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources have estimated the total timber resource impact at a staggering $1.28 billion. This figure alone is sobering, but it only scratches the surface of the longterm economic and environmental consequences facing the state.
Hurricane Helene traversed 8.9 million acres of Georgia’s timberland, affecting approximately 37% of the state’s total timberland. The storm’s path cut a swath from Valdosta to Augusta, with winds reaching up to 100 m.p.h., devastating even well-managed forests.
What makes this disaster particularly concerning is its disproportionate impact on small landowners. Private forested lands accounted for 88% of the impacted land ownership. Farmers of row crops were also hard hit in many places, but they potentially have the partial lifeline of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s crop insurance program.
But under the vagaries of public policy, trees are not crops. Perhaps this disaster is so rare, no thought was given to its impact. For many of these landowners, their timber represented more than just a crop; it was their retirement plan or a college fund for their children. An average investment of up to 20 years was lost overnight.
Before my Saturday trip across southeast Georgia, I spent Friday afternoon and part of Saturday morning with Lindsay Thomas. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Thomas represented southeast Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was that body’s only certified tree farmer. Now, he lives back home in Screven, on land that has been in his family for 150 years. I was getting a crash course in timber management and Helene’s gob smacking implications for the state.
“This isn’t just a problem for the timber industry and those of us out here in the country,” he told me. “The impact of this is going to ripple through the economy and be felt all the way to the tops of those high-rise office buildings in Atlanta. We are talking about the restructuring or even the destruction of a way of life.”
The repercussions extend far beyond the immediate loss of trees. The timber industry is deeply intertwined with various sectors of the economy. Products affected include traditional lumber for construction, paper and paper products, furniture, fabrics and even components in electronics like cellphone screens. In the short term, we may see price fluctuations for wood and cellulose products due to the sudden influx of salvage trees flooding the market.
The road to recovery will be long and challenging. Replanting efforts will be extensive, and it will take from 15 to 30 years for trees to fully grow back, depending on the end products they will be used for. This timeline presents a significant challenge for both the industry and individual landowners. The cleanup process alone is daunting, with many areas still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Michael from 2018. Tree farmers have struggled even to find sufficient trucking resources to pick up the loads and the glut in the market means the prospective sale price at delivery to storage areas could be less than the cost of transporting the wood.
Beyond these formidable impacts, the environmental consequences of the disaster cannot be overstated. Wildlife habitat and water quality will be impaired. There will be an increased risk of forest fires in the coming dry seasons, fueled by fallen timber and debris that is not easily accessed and removed.
The economic fallout may lead to a restructuring of landownership in affected areas. Many forestry farmers, unable to pay their loans due to the loss of their timber assets, may be forced to sell their land at drastically reduced prices. This could pave the way for large forestry companies or investor groups to acquire substantial tracts of land, potentially moving towards a more monopolistic control of the forestry production chain. And farmers who live on their land are the kind of owners who take care of their land—they care about the wildlife and wetlands. An industrial corporate owner is by his nature looking to maximize its profits.
The timber industry has been a vital economic lifeline for these communities, with some analysts saying every dollar spent on forestry turning over eight times in the local economy. It took years to grow these trees, and just minutes to destroy them. Now we must hope that Georgia’s public policy makers and federal lawmakers have time to save what can be saved to restore this livelihood.
(Charles Hayslett is the author of the long-running troubleingodscountry.com blog. He is also the Scholar in Residence at the Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University. The views expressed in his columns are his own and are not necessarily those of the Center or the University. Distributed by the Georgia Trust for Local News.)
