Cleanup continues from 2019 windstorm

Imagine a line of logging trucks stretching from the Town of Lakewood to Decatur, Alabama.

Those trucks would hold just under 300 million board feet of timber. That’s how much has been salvaged so far following a July 19, 2019, windstorm that caused extensive damage to more than 100,000 acres of northern Wisconsin’s Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.

Much of that damage occurred in the forest’s Lakewood-Laona Ranger District, where John Lampereur is stationed as a silviculturist.

The storm has since been classified as a derecho — a widespread, straight-line windstorm associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms.

“A typical summertime front goes from west to east; a derecho turns 90 degrees and it runs through an area kind of like a freight train would,” Lampereur said. “It just keeps coming and coming and coming. It’s very common for them to be 400 miles to as much as 1,000 miles long. This one actually came out of the Dakotas.

“It hit about 286,000 acres across Wisconsin and for the longest time, we weren’t able to accurately determine exactly how many acres were impacted,” he said. “It actually took quite a few weeks before we had enough aerial photo coverage, satellite imagery and interpretation work to figure it out. We had about 130,000 acres of the national forest that were impacted, and there was a lot of county, state and private lands around that were also affected.”

Cleanup efforts began shortly after the storm ended.

“The top priorities were public safety and the safety of our employees,” Lampereur said. “The first efforts were reopening roads and trails. We’re talking hundreds of miles of roads that were bottled shut — in some cases, miles of roads of continuous timber 10 to 15 feet deep. Our sawyers were able to open most of the roads with chain saws in the first months. Opening the more heavily blocked roads was more of a job for heavy equipment and logging contractors with processors. Some of those roads took almost a month to reopen.”

Another challenge was getting an accurate assessment of the damage, according to Lampereur.

“After getting satellite imagery and aerial photography, it took many weeks of painstaking photo interpretation to identify areas of heavy, moderate and light damage,” he said. “In the end, we determined that there were about 130,000 acres impacted, with about 60,000 acres having greater than 25% damage.”

The storm’s aftermath can still be seen along County Road T south of the Town of Townsend in northern Oconto County. The storm hit Boot Lake Campground and the adjacent Jones Spring Recreation Area. The campground remained closed for the rest of 2019, but reopened in 2020.

Jones Spring, however, remains closed to the public.

“Boot Lake Campground was heavily damaged,” Lampereur said. “The weekend of the storm, it was almost fully occupied, but a lot of people that saw the storm coming got out of there. The day after the storm, our saw crews worked for about eight hours to cut all the campers out of there. The campground was closed until the following summer while it was contract logged.”

The storm also caused extensive damage to Jones Spring, a 3,200-acre nonmotorized recreation area with hiking and cross-country ski trails and walk-in campsites. It is also managed for hunting.

“It had severe damage to about 80% of that area,” Lampereur said. “All of the trails were blocked shut. The most cost-effective way to rehabilitate and reopen the area was through the use of salvaged timber sales. Our staff was able to prepare and sell nine sales to clean up about 2,000 acres, including most of the trails. A lot of those sales are still ongoing and so for the public’s safety, the area is still not open to the public. It’s going to have to remain closed until the logging operations have been completed. All the other recreational facilities have been reopened for public use.”

Mike Brown, ranger for the Lakewood-Laona Ranger District, said the storm’s impact was not heavy when it came to the district’s recreation areas. Some campgrounds experienced damage but remained open, he said, which helped when visitation rates increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was a little inconvenient to be without Boot Lake for a year, but once we brought it back on line, we were doing well,” he added. “I think we might have had one injury at Boot Lake and one at Bagley Rapids Campground, but nothing life-threatening. We felt pretty fortunate that we got off that easy.”

Lampereur called the derecho the largest storm damage event since the establishment of the Chequamegon and Nicolet as separate national forests in 1933.

“In 2007, the Quad County Tornado impacted about 10,500 acres of national forest lands in the Mountain and Lakewood area,” he said. “This was a very large and destructive event, but looking back, it was a training exercise for the 2019 storm.”