Perhaps this is what some call a rant, but I’d like to hear some opinions on this. One of my crews was working in Mt. Prospect, a suburb of Chicago, today. I was driving to the job site with an extra load of material for them, when I came across a guy loading logs onto a truck. He worked for the city, and it was a city department truck. There were about 10 logs on the truck, 10-12 feet long, 25-40 inches in diameter, and they were all black walnut. I dropped off the load at the worksite, and ran right over there with dump truck, hoping to coax at least a couple of them out of him.
Turns out, he couldn’t give me any. I called the department of streets, and even got to the supervisor. They just grind them up into mulch. I offered to pay for them, to no avail. I even offered to exchange sidewalk work for the city, in proportions that favored the city, in exchange for all the logs, and as I was talking to the supervisor at the dept. building, a guy in a loader was dumping these beautiful logs, along with some white oak, maple, cherry, ash, and I think hickory, but wasn’t positive, into the grinder, and made a pile of wood chips about 25 feet high and 50 feet wide.
I was disgusted. I can’t understand why a city isn’t smart enough to take advantage of a resource like that.
Jeff
Replies
THAT IS CHICAGO! AND THAT Mayor is ALWAYS fussin' about funds~
I hear ya.. Been there.. did that..
By the way.. The city workers HAVE to be carefull of what they do...
Or loose the job...
Read the first message. He said Mt. Prospect. He may very well have been in Chicago when he met the guys with the trees, but he could have been in any number of suburbs. Do you have an ax to grind with Chicago?
Do you have an ax to grind with Chicago? NA! Well sort of..
I have lived here in Chick-In-The-Car-And-The-Car-Won't-Go... (Chicago) ALL my life!
NA! I have traveled the world all my life with work.. Chicago is still the best place.. Cept in winter!
EDIT:
By the way.. I never saw any Volcanoes in Mt. Prospect! Just outside of Chicago..
Edited 5/20/2005 9:27 pm ET by Will George
Will, when was the last time a city worker lost his/her job in Chicago without a federal indictment in their hand?
George
when was the last time a city worker lost his/her job in Chicago ..
I know first hand it happens.. Just the grunts though. (I was a grunt once).
Especially if they don't go out and get votes and help raise funds for the 'BIG FISH' ...
If you are 'liked' by the bosses murder may get ya suspended with pay...
They need to get their heads out of their rear-ends and get on board with urban tree milling. There are sawyers all over the country (including here in Seattle) who specialize in removing and milling urban trees, for use in cabinetry and furniture building.
I'm terrible at any kind of activism, but it'd be great if a group of WWers could get together and start some kind of movement to get this started in your area.
forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
Another proud member of the "I Rocked With ToolDoc Club" .... :>)
Does anybody know of an urban tree milling operation in the Los Angeles area? I took down one of my Italian Cypress trees over the weekend, and will take the other down soon. So, I'll have four logs to mill, about 11 ft. by 11 - 13" diameter.
-- J.S.
Hi John. Those trees are probably too small. Maybe another member could opine here, but 1' diameter sounds like it to me. forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)Another proud member of the "I Rocked With ToolDoc Club" .... :>)
J I have read enough of your post to know that you have a lot of friends that have connections. It is time to use them. these are the kind of things that cities like to get good publicity for. They think that grinding into chips is good usage.
You need to educate them into realizing that there is a better way to re-cycle them in to art-work.
Here is a link to some other relevant sites.
http://www.woodweb.com/cgi-bin/search/search.cgi
I went through the same thing with State parks. I have lots of friends who made calls on my behalf, and they finally came around. Stupid officials don't like to have their stupidity pointed out by prominent people .
Show them photos of your work. Donate to their favorite charity, or if you already do that list what you do.
Write, or have someone else write an op-ed piece for the local paper. They hate that.
rootburl
All great ideas. I actually sat down last night, and wrote a letter. I figured I'd try the less noisy approach first, informing them of the uses, with pictures, of the resources that they are destroying. We'll see, but I'm not taking this one sitting down.
There are enough 'garbage' trees and limbs from storm damage to make plenty of mulch. In the township where I live, (out in the country) we have a recycling dump. The residents, as well as all the local tree guys, bring their logs, stumps, branches, etc.....and can dump for free. At the end of every month, they grind it all into mulch. During the month, I check it a couple of times a week. There's always a gem or two in there. It would be a wood turners paradise, because most of it is cut into sections that can fit into the back of a suv or pickup truck. I've plundered a few logs out of there that were long enough to mill. :)!
Jeff
After Hurricane Andrew gave all of Miami a trim in 1992, Fairchild Tropical Gardens auctioned off the lumber from the exotics that were felled.
They raised a TON of $ - I went to the auction out of interest (though I wasn't WWing then, worse the luck), and will never forget one stack - I don't know the tree, but the lumber was almost the exact color of orange juice - the most striking color wood I've ever seen, before or since.
Good luck with the letter - 'urban forestry' is a developing area, so you might get some action.
Clay
Here are some links for you to peruse:
Urban Hardwoods, owned by Jim Newsom, an urban tree salvager whom I first read about in November of 2002. Web site is:http://www.urbanhardwoods.com/
Following are two newspaper archive links about his businesses. You may have to register to see them, but it's worth it. Should give you a basic idea of how it works. I'm sure he would be open to a phone call.
From the Business Section fo the Seattle PI, Nov. 4 2002, Sawmill owner builds on 'urban wood'
"Salvaged Sophistication: In handcrafted furniture, damaged trees find a second life."
forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)Another proud member of the "I Rocked With ToolDoc Club" .... :>)
Piqued my interest in that I've seen tons of cypress blowdowns from our various hurricanes here. It's not walnut, but it can make nice outdoor furniture. And there's a lot of sawmills around that could process it. Just maybe if we had real businesspeople working the various political jobs, people who knew the value of assets, there's be less incentive to raise taxes.Just maybe i should be sending this to some of my elected instead of to this discussion site. Bye.
Let me know how I can help. Cities and their suburbs look only towards the bottom line. It may be cheaper to just mulch the wood, don't forget, these are chair jockeys with the imagination to match.
Go get'em Jeff!
George
And when the city gives you the logs, someone comes along and complains that they did not get the logs.
The lumber value might be $300-700 for those logs. I suspect less. Just enough to get the employees fired if they give out the logs.
Maybe they had some plants they needed to kill with that walnut mulch.
Alan
I mentioned that to the guy, about the toxicity of walnut to plants and animals. He looked at me like I was lying, and grasping at thin air. Under the circumstances, he probably thought I was getting desperate, and that aliens were going to come out of the sky to abduct the walnut next!
Jeff
I'd guess a lot of the reluctance is that city employees truly don't know about these things, and that they encounter (or hear about) a lot of people trying to scam them one way or another. It would probably be a lot easier to set up the arrangements without the time pressure of a set of trees that they may be contracted to take care of.You may even be able to figure out who in your local government has the public in mind. Someone smart and honest, but who at present knows nothing about the issue could become your ally.I don't know if the situation is similar in Milwaukee just because we are close, but this guy http://www.lancerigging.com/sawmill.htm seems to have an urban logging operation going. Maybe he would have comments on how to deal with the city, and whether he has managed to do it.
If you have a college with a well-established woodworking program nearby, you could lobby for them to participate in an urban forestry program through which these trees can be converted into lumber.
Here is a link to our school's urban forestry program if you're interested:
http://www.palomar.edu/woodworking
-Jazzdogg-
Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right.
Well, they'd probably hire a Forestry graduate at $200K a year to go out and identify each tree prior to the city crews coming out. The city crews probably wouldn't know a Pine tree from a Catapla tree. Course with just one Forestry person, there would be 1 year wait to get a tree identified. Then, if they gave trees away, there'd have to be a lottery to make it fair. You'd have put up some equity to get your name in the lottery. They'd need your SS number for tax purposes, too. Probably have to sign a liability waiver too in case you died from the saw dust or was allergic to the resins.
The first 15 feet of the tree would have to be trashed anyway cause from all the nails, railroad spikes, bullets, dead bodies, etc in the trunk.
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)
PlaneWood
Wow!
Take a deep breath, the world's not all that bad!
Jeff
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