According to him, Czech experts and foresters are dealing with a situation that has never occurred in the Czech Republic on such a scale. “There is no manual. And the forests of the national park do not have an economic purpose, where the next step would be clearer,” he said.
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The administration of the České Švýcarsko National Park has already announced that it wants to leave the restoration of the forest after the extensive fire mainly to nature. The fire affected 1,060 hectares of land, on which mainly spruces grew. According to experts, foresters should at least cut down potentially dangerous trees that threaten to fall in places where people move.
Even if the damaged trees were harvested, there is a problem with utilization. “It is enough if the wood is charred only on the surface, and it cannot end up at the sawmill and in the production process, for example, as construction wood. It loses its physical-mechanical properties, such as flexibility,” pointed out Vrška.
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Source: HZS Martin Kavka
As Tomáš Pařík, director of the Wood & Paper company added, an exception may be minimally damaged wood, where only the bark (bark) is affected. “In general, the trees in the national park were already dry, so they could practically be processed more or less only for the production of paper, fiberboard or for energy use,” he explained. Theoretically, such wood can paradoxically be burned – in boilers, heating plants, power plants.
Smoldering trees as a reminder
Charred wood must not even enter the paper production process, where it degrades the quality of the product. “On sawmills, the upper parts are milled into so-called sawdust and are mostly used for paper production, so we cannot talk about the possibility of using this wood for sawmill operations,” explained Pařík.
And added criticism. “The main value of wood, as a renewable material, was already lost by the decision to leave bark beetle-infested trees to their fate,” noted Pařík.
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He pointed out that our ancestors already used fire to preserve wood. “Charred is more resistant to decomposition processes and will therefore remind the national park for a long time of irresponsible management of rare renewable resources in the name of so-called nature protection,” he added.
According to Vrška, the surviving but fire-damaged and weakened trees on the edge of the fire area may again be attacked by the bark beetle.
Petr Korvas, a forester from Bzenecká Doubrava in South Moravia, has experience with dying trees after a big fire. Flames burned the forest there ten years ago. “Some weakened trees were gradually dying even five years after the fire,” he mentioned.
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