Were you shocked by the recent drastic tree cutting of the public watershed woods along upper Booth Hill Road in Shelton?
Don’t worry — forestry experts say it is the best way to regenerate the woods after heavy damage from last year’s Superstorm Sandy.
In fact, the Aquarion Water Company, which owns the 19-acre Shelton woodland, even has a section of its company website devoted to the Forest Regeneration Project that was originally announced in January.
The woods, which run along the east side of Booth Hill Road, border the Farmill River upstream from the Isinglass Reservoir, which is part of Aquarion’s public water supply system.
One Valley Independent Sentinel reader said the woods appeared to be “mutilated.”
But Jerry Milne, a senior forestry expert for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) Bureau of Natural Resources, said as drastic as it might appear, the tree cutting was planned.
“The hurricane planned it for us,” Milne said.
According to Aquarion spokesman Peter Fazekas, the 19 acres in Shelton is part of the Centennial Watershed State Forest, 15,000 acres that are owned and managed jointly by the water company, the DEEP and the Nature Conservancy.
It is also part of 130 acres in southwestern Connecticut that received severe tree damage from Sandy when the storm plowed into the state on Oct. 29. Other locations for the tree cutting are on water company land in Easton and Fairfield.
Milne said the strong storm affected artificial forests of white pine trees that are particularly susceptible to damage from hurricane-force winds. He said their branches catch the wind like sails, and their soft wood trunks easily snap from the strain.
“If you’d seen that area right after the hurricane, the hurricane pretty much clear-cut it,” Milne said.
He said it was once popular for water companies to plant pine trees in the watershed to replace the hardwoods that would grow there naturally, under the theory that it kept the hardwood leaves out of the reservoirs. (Leaves from oaks and other hardwood trees contain tannin, an organic compound used in leather tanning, which causes discoloration of reservoir water.)
But it was never proven that the pine tree plantings worked, and besides, nowadays the water company relies on special treatment facilities that eliminate the tannin problem, Milne said.
So forestry experts saw the damage from the hurricane as an opportunity to clear away the pine trees and let the woods grow back naturally.
The few surviving white pines will also benefit from direct sunlight which will help the hardwoods grow back faster and better defend themselves against hungry deer.
“Now that they are exposed to full sunlight they should be able to outgrow the deer,” he said.
Fazekas said the state designated the land in Shelton and the rest of the 15,000 acres in the public watershed as the centennial state forest in 2002.
The work in Shelton is almost completed, except for removing some remaining log piles. Fazekas said some coarse debris would remain to provide nourishment and good soil drainage for the new trees, which should start sprouting soon.
Click here for a previous press release on this subject published by the Valley Indy.
