HELENA, Mont. (AP) -- Smokejumpers, the firefighting elite who parachute to remote forest blazes and fight them, head for New Jersey this week to battle an insect the New York City parks commissioner has called ''a potentially devastating threat to our urban canopy.''
A dozen U.S. Forest Service smokejumpers from western states will climb trees in the Rahway, N.J., area, checking for the Asian longhorned beetle. Trees found harboring the insect will be removed, as were two identified during a recent beetle hunt by smokejumpers in New York City's Central Park.
The work comes as wildfire managers in Montana and other states with wet spring weather anticipate a late start to the West's 2005 fire season. With demand for their usual services likely delayed, smokejumpers' spring work in the East is extending into summer. Their urban beetle surveys began in Chicago in 1998, and have taken place every year since, at various locations.
''Because the fire season hasn't gotten going and we anticipate it won't get going for another three or four weeks, we decided we could send one more group back there,'' said Andy Hayes of the Forest Service's regional smokejumper center in Missoula, Mont. Part of the crew going to New Jersey on Wednesday practiced climbing trees Tuesday in a Missoula park.
The jumpers, whose primary mission is to attack backcountry blazes before they grow too big to manage, already know how to go up and down trees. Fire training prepares them for the possibility that they'll parachute into one and have to get down -- then go back up for the chute. Backcountry climbing is done with spurs that dig into the tree trunk. Urban hardwoods, which are attacked by beetles and have relatively thin bark, would be damaged by spurs and are climbed with ropes instead.
The federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which coordinates efforts against the Asian longhorned beetle, likes to use smokejumpers because they can climb to the tops of 90-foot trees and because the jumpers' safety training is extraordinary.
In Central Park, the two infested American elms found along Fifth Avenue were among more than 3,800 park trees that smokejumpers inspected in a survey that began in mid-March and ended last week. Asian longhorned beetles also were found nearly 3
