'Lombardi in Arudy!'. A snapshot of logging in the French Pyrenees from 1916 to 1975.

摘要

In 1916, Aldo Lombardi (1892-1965), the son of a sawmill owner from Ticino and his friend Morello purchased a sawmill in the Western Pyrenees and used a three-cables aerial logging system to log pine. In 1920, for the purposes of a felling the sawmill was moved to the Upper Pyrenees, and thence to Arudy (Atlantic Pyrenees) where the firm took on a intermunicipal logging concession contract that covered one million cubic metres, implementing state-of-the-art techniques to perform most of the fellings that took place in the Bearn region for nearly 50 years. Lombardi & Morello Inc. employed up to 1 000 people in 1938 and was remarkably integrated, going from the use of three-cables aerial logging systems - where it became leader in France - to the manufacture, during the last war, of pre-assembled army huts. When Jacques Lombardi (1929-2002) became his father's sole successor in 1965, he was one of the first to make prefabricated chalets and trussed rafters. The very high cost of harvesting mountain timber and the drop in softwood prices forced the company to close down in the 1990's. Its logging techniques, with the complete replacement of threecables aerial logging systems by forest roads and tracks as of 1970, continue to very sharply mark the forest stands on difficult landform in the Western Pyrenees.