On 2020-11-30 11:08 a.m., Mike Duffy wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Nov 2020 10:03:11 -0500, Dave Smith wrote:
>
>> It would have been over $10,000 [...] on my property.
>
> Easy. As you said,
>
> DO Cost_Item IN [ Height Diameter Infected Rotten Obstructed ]
> Cost += Several(Cost_Item) * $K
> ENDDO
>
> I paid $2K for one healthy white ash. The city paid me several hundred.
> In Quebec, the emerald ash-borer beetle, (Or as Trump calls it, "The
> Chinese Beetle"), is spreading way faster than anticipated.

A friend said she paid $11,000 to have a dozen dead ash trees taken down
on their property. These were all basically straight trees with trunks
no more than a foot in diameter. They would have cut them themselves
had they not been near the house or near power lines. Another friend
paid about $1500 to remove the rest of a poplar tree after a big piece
snapped off the top and landed on his fence. I never realized how many
ash trees we had here until the last two years when almost entire
forests died off from the green ash borer. It doesn't seem that long
ago that people were bitching and moaning about the government cutting
down all their local ash trees in order to create an ash borer exclusion
zone. Too little too late around here.

>
> Basically, we only have a few years to cut down the ash trees. Soon, they
> will all get the pest and die. So when they would need to be cut down,
> they would be even taller and thicker.

Dang. They will go the way of the Elm trees. There have been a few
places around here where clusters of elms made a valiant attempt to
return. They get to be 8-10 inches in diameter and 25-30 feet high and
then in a matter of weeks they just disappear. We had one elm three in
the yard. One day I noticed that all the leaves on one of the two main
trunks had suddenly turned brown. Two weeks later it happened to the
other side.


> The tree-cutting department at the city had a form which the arborist
> filled in with the exact measurements from the registered contaminated
> waste dispostion agency, who get paid to properly document burying of
> what everyone can see is uninfected wood, and I got the cheque a few
> weeks later.

No one is paying me anything for this maple. That's okay. I am just
grateful that the town is taking care of it. However, I am going to miss
that magnificent old tree.
>