Corporation to auction Vardah-hit trees on January 2

The cyclone had knocked down nearly 17,000 trees in and around Chennai on December 12 last year. In addition to this, 50,000 branches were severed due to the high-intensity winds. The civic body had stored the wood from the felled trees at 78 temporary locations. A total of 49,960 MT (metric tonnes) of wood was generated. 

An e-auction initiated through the Central government organisation MSTC Ltd was abandoned twice, due to low price quoted by the contractors/auctioneers. For the current auction, interested parties were requested to visit the locations, where the wood was stored and specify new prices, through a drop box kept at the venues. 

The envelopes will be opened on January 2 at 3 pm and the tender-cum-auction will be conducted. The reason for the lack of takers is because most of the wood generated has no timber value. A senior Corporation official said, “Only 30 per cent of the entire lot will be useful, but mostly as firewood. 

When the trees fell, we didn’t make a size assessment. The trees with usable trunks were chopped to smaller pieces by our staff, who are not professional wood-cutters. Due to this, the sizes of timber are not uniform.” 

Another official added, “Interested parties can inspect the wood, quote a price and buy during the auction. The purpose of the wood depends on the kind of trees that were felled and the industry to which the buyer belongs.” 

While the huge volume of wood has raised concerns of effective disposal, environmentalists hope that the felled trees would not be used solely as firewood. Environmentalist Nityanand Jayaraman said, “Ideally, these trees are carbon that must be fixed into the ground. The trees have painstakingly acquired carbon and stored it. Burning it and releasing all that carbon would be foolhardy. One of the possibilities is to convert this wood to charcoal, which is a good soil-treating agent.”