JEFFERSON PARK — Efforts to beat back the spread of a pest that is felling ash trees all over Chicago have been overwhelmingly successful, city officials said.
Of the 5,400 parkway trees injected in 2011 and 2012 with chemicals designed to protect them from the emerald ash borer, 5,000 trees are still alive and have been retreated, city officials said in a statement.
The emerald ash borer may be smaller than a penny, but the pest has doomed hundreds of trees across the Northwest Side by eating them from the inside out, leaving the trees brittle and unsteady.
Heather Cherone says tree inoculation costs less than 5 percent of the price of cutting down trees and replacing them:
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the results prove his administration's efforts to fight the infestation rather than chop down the trees is "a common sense investment in Chicago’s parkway trees."
Emanuel vowed to protect "the viability of our ash tree population for many years to come."
In July, officials boosted the city's tree budget by $2.7 million to trim an additional 15,000 trees, plant another 2,800 trees and finish injecting 35,000 parkway ash trees with the insecticide.
In 2013, Emanuel vowed to treat all of the salvageable ash trees in the city's parkways with the insecticide, which must be repeated every two to three years. The effort will be completed this fall, officials said.
The cost to inoculate a tree is $46, compared with $1,000 to remove and replace a tree, city officials said.
There are approximately 580,000 trees along the city's streets and sidewalks, and nearly 85,000 of them are ash trees at risk of being infested with the ash borer, which has killed tens of millions of trees in 21 states since it was discovered in Michigan in 2002.
In the 45th Ward alone, the emerald ash borer has claimed 400 trees, which the city is working to replace with species like lindens, maples and oaks that do not attract the pest.
Trees that have been infested by the ash borer have thin, yellow leaves, elephant skin-like bark and dead branches at their crown, officials said.
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