OT but ....

[piccadillypilot]

I guess it must have been a quiet day in Sweden then?

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4192358.stm

Swedes wowed by huge pile of logs
By Malcolm Brabant
Byholma, Sweden

The people of Sweden have been flocking in their tens of thousands this summer to a surprise tourist attraction.

It is the world's biggest pile of tree trunks, brought down earlier this year by a freak hurricane.

The tree trunks are piled 13 metres high, in six rows, stretching for two kilometres at a disused airfield in Byholma, southern Sweden.

Lorries haul timber around-the-clock - and more than 2,000 tourists a day come to watch the giant cranes in action.

Tourists stand soaked to the skin in the mud, riveted by the sight.

Soon the disused runway will be full and the timber will sit here for two years before, no doubt, being turned into self-assembly furniture. And that is when the fun stops.

I guess he too has tried to assemble flat pack furniture from a well known Swedish based store!

[zman]

Lets see...where we live, the top story is udually about terrorism. In Sweden, it's about a pile of logs.

I wonder if they need any American Train Operators in Sweden? Sounds like my kinda joint.

[igelkotten]

There is a back story to this.

The "pile of logs" is actually, as the article states, the world's largest lumber storage. And yes, it completely covers a former military airfield, once the homebase of a bomber squadron, so it is not exactly a small one either.

And this is only about one percent of the total amount of timber that was felled by the hurricane "Gudrun" which struck southern Sweden this january.

It is an area of Sweden with extensive forestry, and during those few hours of the hurricane, an amount of timber equal to about forty years of logging was brought down. Likewise, several hundreds of thousands were left without telephone or electricity for up to several months. The electricity grid was more or less wiped out, the railway traffic brought to a standstill for about a week, several roads completely washed out, and literally every road in the area damaged to some extent.

A lot fo these forests were owned by small part-time farmers, and represented their life savings. Few had an extra storm insurance, since that was and is an expensive form of insurance that is percieved as very hard to get any renumeration from. The result was that quite a few people literally lost everything they had -as small farmers, most of their farm was in debt to various banks, with the forest as collateral.

While the process of clearing out the stormfelled forests started quickly, it is important to remember that modern lumber mills demand very specific qualities of the lumber as regards length, fibre density and so on. This meant that a lot of the stormfelled timber was only good for the cheapest grades of paper pulp, since the quality was unspecified. So even if the forestry farmers could sell off their timber, they did so at a heavy loss. More people have comitted suicide out of desperation after the hurricane than died during the storm itself.

Since I have relatives in the area that was hardest hit, and happen to own a house and some forest there, I was actually down there when the hurricane struck. It took us three days of hard work to be able to get from the house, along the small forest road to the large "county road", which by the way only had one lane opened -the other one was still filled with rubble. The forests in which I grew up had more or less disappeared. There were areas around our house that I simply couldn't recognise anymore. When we went down to the house again this april, we noticed immediately as we crossed the county border that there was a strong smell of pine in the air, from all the fallen and broken trees lying everywhere. The power company in the area, as well as the telecommunications companies have actually created a worldwide shortage of certain key equipment, since they need so much to rebuild the severly damaged network.

This summer, there were several severe forest fires in the areas that hadn't been cleared yet. One side effect of these forest fires was that they brought down large areas of the provisionally repaired phone network again.

[piccadillypilot]

Thanks for the background info Igelkotten. As always when there's a major storm or a hurricane there's always a human cost.

As I'm sure you realise the "quiet day" comment referred to people going to see the stacks on the airfield.

[igelkotten]

Nah, I'm sure you meant no harm. And of course, had I been a ruddy furriner and reading that same article, I would also have considered the Swedes to be suspiciously similar to the vegetables. But, as in so many other cases, the backstory makes things quite a bit different.

Of course, one could start wondering about the biases and distortions in quite a few of those "human interest" and "oddity" stories that gets around in the news, too.

[Dmitri]

igelkotten said:

But, as in so many other cases, the backstory makes things quite a bit different.

And the backstory - which is crucial for understanding - has beed completely ignored by the media...