Minutes – Hazard Tree Committee Meeting
8/15/00
Twenty-seven
members of the Hazard Tree Committee met for lunch on Tuesday, August 15, 2000.
The meeting was devoted to two topics:
1) Putting western hazard
tree information on the Web, and 2) developing
an agenda for the next Hazard Tree Workshop planned for May, 2001 in Coeur
d’Alene.
The Forest
Health Protection staff in St. Paul maintains a web site devoted to hazard
trees. The site is maintained by
Joe O’Brien and contains a lot of good information, but the focus is almost
entirely on hardwoods. Joe has
agreed to add western material to his site.
If individuals have publications, meeting announcements or digital images
they would like to see included on the St. Paul site they can contact Joe
directly or work through John Pronos.
John Schwandt
and Jane Taylor will host the next workshop in Coeur d’Alene.
It will likely be a 2 or 2 ½ day session with at least 1 day spent on
indoor presentations. One possible
location for the meeting is the North Idaho College campus.
The group agreed that it would be fine to have the meeting there and have
participants stay at local motels. It
was widely agreed that the field trip should include dissections of defective
hazardous trees.
Several
excellent topics were suggested for the indoor presentations and included:
- Case studies: follow specific tree accidents from failure to legal resolution that provide information to help us improve our efforts.
- Legal issues: try to get local Forest Service or other federal or state attorneys to present their views on hazard trees.
- Concessionaires – big issue with most western Forest Service regions. We hold them responsible to deal with hazard trees, but they are, for the most part, un- qualified to do this work. Can we influence how their permits are written and require their personnel to receive training?
- Data gaps – what information do we need and how do we get it? A good example is how to gather data to support rating systems.
- How do we motivate managers to be more supportive of hazard tree programs?
- Mountain meteorology – can we learn more about the weather patterns that can influence some tree failures?