Photo By Andrew Stamer | Beth Buckrucker, quality assurance representative, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,...... read more read more
JOPLIN, Mo. – The EF-5 tornado that struck Joplin May 22 churned for six miles through the center of town, leaving a path of destruction three times the size of New York’s Central Park in its wake.
As much as a third of the city was destroyed; homes, schools, fire stations and businesses. And trees. Thousands of them. Black oaks, sycamores, cypresses, elms, some as old as 100 years. Trees that shaded generations of families, snapped by 200 miles-per-hour winds like toothpicks.
“It’s a loss of neighborhood, really,” said Jon Skinner, an urban forester with the Missouri Department of Conservation. “It’s a shared green space. The streets were the gathering place because they were shaded by these trees. It’s that emotional connection that’s going to be hardest to replace.”
Felled and splintered, they added up to an estimated 435,000 cubic yards of debris – enough to fill a big league baseball stadium. All of it needs to be cleared.
As part of the federal tornado recovery effort, the Federal Emergency Management Agency assigned the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the mission to clear Joplin’s streets and homes of debris. It is an enormous task. More than 270 haul trucks continue to work daily to remove it, supervised by about 120 Corps quality assurance specialists. But while much of what’s left of buildings can only go to a landfill, the trees are destined for a second life.
The process starts with sorting. Building materials from homes – like splintered lumber, bricks and furniture – is separated from potentially hazardous items like electrical appliances, paint and cleaning supplies. Trees and shrubs are segregated and hauled separately to a city-owned site in the northwest corner of town, called the Schifferdecker vegetation disposal site. There, crews work 12 hours a day breaking the material down by using an industrial-size wood chipper weighing in at a whopping 60,000 pounds, and turning into rough-cut mulch.
And it’s a lot of mulch. After weeks of deliveries, stories-high piles of tree stumps – more than 2,800 to date – branches and mulch are stacking up out at Schifferdecker. But not for long. Green Country Soil, a landscaping supply company in nearby Miami, Okla., has agreed to take almost all of the mulch – saving local and federal governments the cost of disposal, and keeping the trees close to home, where they’ll likely help grow the next generation of Joplin’s urban forest.
“Mulching is a great tool for tree re-growth,” said Skinner, who’s working with the community on a plan for tree re-planting. “It’s a good use of that resource.”
But first, the rough mulch must be cleaned, taking out foreign debris, such as metal, to make it suitable for lawns and gardens when it is shipped to stores within a 100-mile radius. The company will further process the chunks from Schifferdecker by grinding it down to a typical mulch size for commercial and residential use. Lastly, the company will dye the mulch a brown or black color, said Tim Potter, a vice president at Oak Castle Lawn and Garden, the parent company of Green Country Soil.
The company’s proximity to Joplin means that much of the material may end up back where it started.
This situation is atypical to the mulching industry because they normally have sources where they get wood byproducts to make the mulch, said Potter, who has been in the business for 20 years. “We don’t wait for storms to get material. We’re just trying to help out.”
And Green Country is doing that by keeping this reusable material out of the landfill, and instead going to lawns where it will turn back into soil, grow more plants and reestablish trees, Potter said.
“We feel bad for the citizens of Joplin and the loss of their trees. But this is as good an ending as we can help make,” Potter said.
“It’s kind of neat,” said Charlie Hall, a liaison to local government agencies with the Corps’ Joplin Recovery Field Office. “The trees that were lost will wind up as mulch for the new trees folks will be planting.”
(Andrew Stamer, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Joplin Recovery Office, contributed to this story.)
| Date Taken: | 07.17.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 07.18.2011 19:20 |
| Story ID: | 73922 |
| Location: | JOPLIN, MISSOURI, US |
| Web Views: | 341 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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