A city under attack! (From Worcester News)

A city under attack!

2:48pm Friday 19th September 2008

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THE Worcester in the United States is under attack by a tenacious foe that arrived from foreign shores unbeknownst to us a number of years ago.

The residents of the city learned early last month that Asian longhorned beetles have infested hundreds of trees in at least one neighborhood of the city and possibly more.

The beetles, thought to have slipped into the United States in wooden shipping pallets from China, are a major threat to a number of species of hardwood trees, especially maples. As it turns out, our Worcester is full of Norway maples planted for shade after a tornado felled thousands of trees here in the 1950s.

It’s like an Asian longhorned beetle resort here with street after street lined with maples, and the voracious bugs appear to have taken full advantage of the profusion of tasty wood here.

A team led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture has descended on Worcester to begin a massive eradication effort expected to take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars – a portion of which Uncle Sam expects the cash-strapped city to pay much to City Hall's consternation.

Federal agriculture regulators are so terrified of seeing the destructive pests, which bore holes in trees to lay their eggs, disrupt the timber and maple syrup industries that they cut down every susceptible tree within a quarter mile of an infested tree when the beetles last turned up, in central New Jersey a few years ago.

In that infestation, more than 21,500 trees were cut down over several years in a few small towns. The overwhelming majority of those trees were healthy hardwood trees that just happened to be too close to the just over 600 infested trees.

In just three weeks of surveying here, inspectors already have found 700 infested trees. And that’s just one neighborhood. The surveys have now moved on to other neighborhoods.

People in Worcester, which is surprisingly leafy in the outlying neighborhoods away from downtown, are understandably nervous about what might happen here. Will they lose their shade and privacy to armies of chainsaw-wielding loggers?

City, state and federal authorities are still debating the eradication approach to be taken here, but word is that the feds are pushing the New Jersey protocol while city officials are resisting that as too drastic for Worcester.

The tree cutting is expected to begin after the first frost of the year, a time when the beetles aren’t active and won’t fly away spreading the infestation.

I’ll let you know what happens.