The emerald ash borer -- scourge of forests, destroyer of ash trees -- has reemerged in Prince George's County, Md., and officials are scrambling to prevent the beetle from spreading to Anne Arundel and other nearby counties.
The invasive bug, native to Asia, recently killed more than 20 million ash trees in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. To keep that from happening here, state officials are preparing to cut down all ash trees in an 11,000-acre swath in the Clinton-Brandywine area, close to where the insect was discovered this summer and fall.
State officials have issued a quarantine for Prince George's, meaning that no ash trees, a popular shade and landscaping tree that is plentiful in Western Maryland forests, may be taken out of the county. All hardwood firewood must also stay in the county.
"The most important thing that homeowners, firewood dealers, hunters, campers, developers, excavating companies, nursery operators and others can do is simply to keep ash products, as well as all hardwood firewood, where they are," Agriculture Secretary Lewis R. Riley said in a written statement. "Don't transport any firewood from Prince George's County: 'Buy it where you'll burn it' instead."
Carol Holko, chief of the plant protection and weed management section of the Maryland Department of Agriculture, said the trees must be cut down to keep the beetle from spreading.
"If we don't control it here, it will spread to our neighboring states," she said. "The consequences could be dire. A whole genus of trees could be gone."
Maryland officials don't have much time to act. By spring, emerald ash borers, which are now in larval form living under the bark of infested trees, will emerge as adults. So state officials are working to identify all ash trees in a 1 1/2 -mile radius around the affected area and chop them down, Holko said.
Officials will leave trees other than ashes standing, she said. Still, she estimated that 10,000 to 15,000 ash trees might have to be cut down.
The beetle was first discovered in the United States in 2002. The exotic pest spread from north to south. In 2003, it was discovered at a nursery in the Clinton area. State officials issued a quarantine, tracked trees sold from the nursery that could have been affected and eradicated ash trees within a half-mile radius.
They also put out bait trees -- other ash trees -- near the nursery to monitor the pest's activity. "We were watching to make sure we got them all," Holko said. For more than two years, officials heard of no other trees being affected. Until August.
That's when officials pulled back the bark of a bait tree and saw that it was infested.
"We realized we had a problem," Holko said. A new quarantine, which is expected to last three years, was issued. And state officials asked residents within a two-mile radius to be on the lookout for sickly trees.
Then, in October, a nearby resident reported that she had a dying tree in her yard. It, too, was infested. Once an ash tree is infested by the emerald ash borer, it dies, Holko said. "It's 100 percent fatal," she said.
Holko said that the state is still surveying the area to see how many ash trees will need to come down. She said the state hopes to start logging operations within the next week.
Residents are urged to report any signs of the beetle to the University of Maryland Home and Garden Information Center at 800/342-2507 or the Maryland Department of Agriculture at 410/841-5920.