BARTLE KNOBS, IN. (WDRB) - The beautiful hills of Bartle Knobs in southern Indiana are bald and stripped of trees. The EF-4 tornado that ripped through in March left a mess behind. One logging crew has a system down. One man does the clearing, another worker does the cutting, and a third comes behind and hauls logs away. The man that owns the property that the crew is working on lost his home, which sits on 85 acres. "He is paying us for getting them out for him, but he's selling them to people like Worley Lumber Company, mills like that," said Jon Arnold, a logger.
The storm destroyed the woods from top to bottom. It will take a while, but one by one, logs are pulled out. "Whenever we first started here it wasn't nothing but pine, and pine ain't worth very much," said Arnold. The good logs that can be used for hardwood bring in more money. Each log that is added to the pile jacks up the price.
Arnold says a good truckload can fetch $1200-$1600.
The Clark State Forest had to hire out work to clean up 1500 acres impacted by the tornadoes. Just like storm victims, the state forest will profit from selling the lumber, and the contractors are getting work out of the devastation, too. Officials with the state forest say the work is expected to be completed within a year, but the faster the contractors get the work done, the more money they will make.
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