Submitted photo
An adult emerald ash borer.
With her steady, strong winds and soil-weakening torrential rains, Hurricane Irene was the perfect storm for knocking trees down. Entomologist Dick Bean said Maryland dodged a perfect emerald ash borer storm by a trick of timing.
“It’s not flight season,” he said about the invasive species of ash-tree killing, invasive Asian insects. “If this were June, in peak flight season, they would have been scattered all over the place.”
Bean is a survey entomologist with the Maryland Department of Agriculture with the field office monitoring the ash borer invasion.
The bug feeds on ash trees, killing them, and entered Maryland in southern Prince George’s County in a contaminated shipment from a Michigan nursery in 2003.
Originally, the state established a quarantine in Prince George’s and Charles counties prohibiting wood from the jurisdictions from being taken anywhere else.
But this year the ban on moving hardwood firewood was relaxed, and wood from any county west of the Chesapeake Bay and Susquehanna River is allowed to be transported to another such county.
“That’s political science, not biological science,” Bean said, wryly noting that the relaxed ban more closely reflects the reality of wood transporting in the state. He said the quarantine did extend to a prohibition on moving wood out of state.
The risk from Irene outside of the ash borer flight season is the abundance of wood everywhere from trees downed by the hurricane, Bean said.
“The only problem is people moving all that wood around,” Bean said. “It has the potential to spread.”
A state agriculture department press release notes the nitty-gritty of the ban, prohibiting transporting known ash wood or mixed hardwood unless it is “chipped to less than an inch in diameter in two dimensions. Quarantine restrictions apply to mixed wood of unknown species.”
Call 410-841-5920 with questions.
jdavis@somdnews.com