Conservationists turn dead urban trees into timber

To stop California’s 6 million urban trees from killing power lines, crashing into homes, or getting in the way when they die, humans must intervene.

This week, several arborists and members of the Conservation Corps from Long Beach gathered on a scrappy plot of land in the corner of a city park to do just that.

In the morning, corps members used a construction vehicle to take one of the dozens of logs from the shade structure and put them into a giant orange wood milling machine.

Long Beach Conservation Corps worker Pablo De La Garza grinds a large log in the lumber yard at Willow Springs Park in Long Beach.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

“You know what happens – the same routine,” Tito Leulusoo, the corps staff supervisor, called out to the group. “It should be easy. Let’s catch it.”

Saw whirred to life. The corpsman slowly, sliced ​​the clean skin off one side of the log. This piece of wood, once a thick eucalyptus tree living in the city, will one day become a bench – perhaps in one of the city parks in Long Beach.

It’s a seedling of the vision of the corps dreamed up just a few years ago. The Corps has planted trees since its inception in 1987, and now wants to take care of the trees after they die, into wood that can be used for houses, tables, benches, statues – you name it.

“The only limit is your imagination,” says John Mahoney, Urban Timber Manager at West Coast Arborists. “It’s the building material that people like the most, if you look at the past, until you can see the future – it’s warm wood.”

The Long Beach Conservation Corps operates a sawmill in the city in a city park. Pictured from left are Pablo De La Garza, Javier Valladares, John Mahoney, JJ Ortega and Maurice Lopez at Willow Springs Park in Long Beach.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Dan Knapp, executive director of the Long Beach Conservation Corps, hopes to see the program grow into something bigger. Currently, they are working on and off with some borrowed equipment, but Knapp wants to see a crew of corps members dedicated to the project in full, with its own mill and kiln to dry the wood, and a shop to sell it – all located on the same plot.

For every tree the corps plants, it hopes to plant two.

The amount of wood available in the cities is not small. Annual, another tree fell in cities than those harvested from national forests, and researchers think that urban trees can replace them about 10% from the United States’ annual wood consumption.

After the corps won a $1 million grant from Cal Fire in 2022 to start the program, the corps immediately became one of the country’s longtime leaders in urban timber: the West Coast Arborists.

John Mahoney, left, city timber manager of West Coast Arborists; Dan Knapp, executive director and chief executive of the Long Beach Conservation Corps; and Javier Valladares, director of construction training, Conservation Corps of Long Beach, discuss the city’s recent tree-killing.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

The organization quickly agreed to help the corps. The city’s wood resources are plentiful. “It’s stupid for us to think we can take it on, on our own,” said Mahoney. “It will take everyone to grow this whole movement. … You can save the world as long as you don’t want credit.

West Coast Arborists say that the city’s trees have ended up in the homes of A-list celebrities (they don’t have the right to name them). acoustic guitar body and perform at the Los Angeles County Fair (as part of an event where people balance on the log rolling across the lagoon).

“You never hear where the wood is grown,” Mahoney said, “but for us, it’s amazing that trees grown in Long Beach are now in Architectural Digest…

Mahoney comes from a family of tree lovers, and he’s full of fun facts about trees – from how fungi can dye wood in rainbow colors to the correct way to calculate a tree’s age. (Always add five years to the ring count, the first few years get smushed together into the middle of the tree, he said.)

During the milling session, Mahoney and his colleagues instructed corps members as they worked on the giant milling machine.

For Knapp, the excitement through urban wood is not only an environmental benefit – it is an opportunity to reach young people who are not sure how to move forward in life and provide employment and career development opportunities.

John Mahoney, city wood manager of West Coast Arborists, holding a piece of wood cut by Conservation Corps Long Beach workers.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

“We’re attracting young people, I think, at an important part of life,” Knapp said. “You can be a high school graduate. You can before going to jail. You can be all of these, and you will come to us.

The corps provides opportunities to complete your GED, attend college or vocational school, and meet employers.

“I think this is your typical story of being on a bad road,” Leulusoo said. “The corps led me to the right path.”

High school hasn’t worked for Leulusoo, who was born and raised in Long Beach. Some of his family members were in the corps, so he decided to join.

Marco Navarrete and Madisen Tanore joined the corps after starting their college education. He just couldn’t ignore the itch to get his hands dirty and have a direct impact on his community.

“Corps, they let you try whatever you want.” said Navarrete, who grew up in LA He studied psychology but hopes to go into project management. “It’s something that will help me here … whether it’s with the corps, or anywhere in Long Beach, really.”

For some of the five corps members on site, it was their first day on the lawn. He came from working on road construction, water irrigation and various other corps projects to spend the day with the business-less Leulusoo and the giddy Mahoney learning the art of wood-milling.

The corps has even developed a 40-hour training program with West Coast Arborists designed to prepare corps members for entry-level jobs in the field. Knapp’s hope is that if he doesn’t get a job from West Coast Arborists, he can use his skills in sustainable logging in the forests of Southern California, which is overwhelming. flammable vegetation.

Long Beach Conservation Corps workers take a photo during a break from milling and piling wood recently.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Building an urban wood project from the ground up is not easy – and if the city wants to use 10% of the wood consumption that can be filled with urban wood, this is an even more difficult challenge.

First, the city needs to know where the dead trees are. Lara Roman, a research ecologist with the Forest Service, said there are two approaches cities can take: proactive and reactive.

“Reactive management is when all you can do is respond to the latest emergency, and it’s generally seen, in urban forestry, as not being an appropriate system,” Roman said. “The best system is, they’ve got the most up-to-date inventory and know where all the trees are most at risk.”

An inventory of all the trees in an area allows the city to send crews to remove trees at risk when a strong storm arrives or to remove certain tree species that are vulnerable to pests that travel across the state to Southern California.

But this inventory is difficult and expensive to create and maintain. “Making a tree inventory is very expensive. You have to pay someone to walk down every street and measure every tree,” said Natalie Love, who helped compile the inventory into a database of 6 million urban trees in California as a researcher at California Polytechnic State University. “It’s a lot of manual labor.”

Even if the organization receives notification of fallen trees, keeping them processed requires additional care, and not all trees can still be used as timber, especially if they die due to disease or pests.

In these cases, it is usually cut into mulch and compost, since California ban citizens (including companies and governments) from sending dead trees to the landfill.

However, this negates one of the main benefits of urban trees: They collect carbon from the atmosphere and store it in wood.

“Carbon sequestration in urban trees is very short-lived,” Love said. “If the tree is up to 30 years, that means it has 30 years of carbon absorption, but if the city comes and cuts it and turns it into wood chips, then the wood chips rot, the carbon goes back into the atmosphere.”

But if arborists use chipped trees as mulch to support gardens, new trees or other plant life, they can still keep carbon out of the air.

“Mulch is great,” Mahoney said, pointing out another tree fact. “What’s the point of the tallest tree?” he said, referring to his end-of-life use of the most carbon sequesters. It turned out to be out mulch is second to woodwith firewood in third and landfills in dead last.

“Am I anti-mulch? Not every tree is good for wood,” Mahoney said. In urban wood, “we’re actually sorting pearls.”