Officials plan for arrival of Emerald Ash Borer
Local board will evaluate borough parks for vulnerable trees
Borough officials are warning residents that an unwanted invader could cause damage to trees all around North Wales.
“The borough will start seeing trees removed from its landscape by the hundreds, with our outbreak of the Emerald Ash Borer,” said councilman Jim Cherry.
“In this area, it’s going to be an epidemic. You are going to see thousands of trees just be wiped out from the area,” he said.
Local municipalities have spent much of the past several years discussing what to do about the Emerald Ash Borer, an invasive insect first spotted in Pennsylvania in 2007 and found in Montgomery County in 2013 and in Philadelphia last summer. The Emerald Ash Borer eats away at ash trees from the inside, leaving a distinctive pattern of lines below the bark of ash trees, which die after
the borer destroys the tissues that convey water and nutrients through the trees.
“A lot of people view (trees) as something that just creates leaves and stuff in gutters, but they’re living, breathing organisms,” Cherry said.
“We have to start a heavy replanting program, because it’s going to get real ugly soon,” he said.
Cherry told council during a recent meeting that the borough’s parks board has done an inventory of ash trees and found they are most heavily concentrated in Hess Park, located at Eighth and Walnut streets, and many of those trees had already been damaged when a rain garden was built at that park. Other parks in town
tend to have one or two scattered ash trees, according to Cherry, but many of the borough’s highest concentrations of ash trees are on private property.
Private homeowners can treat the trees with chemical injections that could preserve a tree for one to two years, according to Cherry, but should the borough publicize information for residents, and/or develop a plan for removing those that may be vulnerable?
“We should at least, if nothing else, be proactive with the ash trees that we have that can be saved,” said councilman Jim Sando.
“Otherwise, we’re going to be paying to take them down, which is also not cheap,” he said.
Borough Manager Christine Hart said information about the Emerald Ash Borer has been posted on the borough’s website since shortly after she took over as manager in late 2015; that information can be found under the “News and Events” header of the site. Hart added she was aware of other municipalities like neighboring Upper Gwynedd and nearby Montgomery Township that have hired professional consultants to do assessments of their trees and the potential damage, and asked if council would like her to do the same.
Cherry said as a certified arborist with a local landscaping business, “that’s part of my job to begin with,” and said the vast majority of his calls in recent months have been about ash tree removal. Cherry said he and the parks board and shade tree commission would begin to evaluate the borough by sections, determine where the most immediate needs are, and report back at future meetings.