Hurricane Michael tore through the United States’ timber basket, flattening forests, crippling mills and sending prices into freefall. In the hardest‑hit areas of Florida and Georgia, forest inventory collapsed to just 22.7% of pre‑storm levels. As a result, hardwood prices plummeted 77%, pine prices fell 9%, and pulpwood prices dropped 6% as salvage logging flooded supply chains, causing havoc to forest products.
Those figures come from “Evaluating Hurricane Impacts on Timber Markets in the Southeastern United States: A Case of Hurricane Michael,” a peer-reviewed study published by Austin Lamica and Rajan Parajuli of North Carolina State University, with Consuelo Brandeis of the U.S. Forest Service.
Using a Regression Discontinuity in Time design and bi‑monthly stumpage price data from hurricane‑affected and surrounding micro‑markets, the team isolated the storm’s direct impact on timber prices. “Our findings indicate that Hurricane Michael led to a 6 % decline in pine pulpwood prices across the region, and a 9 % and 77 % decrease in pine sawtimber and hardwood sawtimber prices, respectively”, they wrote. “In unaffected or lightly impacted regions, the price effects were more variable and product-specific.”
Wood Central understands that the steepest collapses came in Florida’s Panhandle and southwest Georgia, where the 2018 hurricane levelled vast tracts of forest. Limited hardwood mill capacity — just 10 hardwood sawmills operated across the affected parts of Florida, Georgia and Alabama — magnified the crash. With mills unable to process the sudden glut of salvaged logs, hardwood sawtimber values cratered. Pine markets also reeled, with salvage harvests accounting for more than half of the remaining live pine volume in the worst‑hit areas.
The shockwaves spread well beyond the disaster zone. In surrounding markets, pine sawtimber fell by up to 13%, pine pulpwood by as much as 16%, and pine chip‑n‑saw by a staggering 95% in one adjacent region, as mills sourced cheaper salvage timber from hurricane‑damaged stands.
Not all markets moved in the same direction: in some areas untouched by the storm, prices rose as mills ramped up production to meet reconstruction demand, with hardwood sawtimber gaining 4% in parts of Georgia and hardwood pulpwood increasing 11% in South Carolina. “The intensity of catastrophic weather events, such as hurricanes, is projected to increase across the Southeastern United States,” the authors warned. “With nearly half of the region’s land covered by productive forests, periodic large‑scale storms frequently disrupt timber supply and destabilise local markets.”
Michael damaged an estimated 6.17 million acres of timberland, resulting in the salvage of 1.66 billion cubic feet of wood, and left another 1.5 billion cubic feet of dead standing timber inaccessible due to destroyed roads and waterlogged soils. In Florida alone, the storm destroyed 40,000 homes and caused an estimated $25 billion in total damage.
The authors say their findings “shed light on the timber market dynamics immediately following a catastrophic hurricane and provide nuanced perspectives to forest managers, landowners, and timber investors as they plan for future risk management in the timber supply chain and forest sustainability.” As climate change fuels more intense and frequent hurricanes, the study’s message is clear: the next major storm could bring not only devastation but a cascade of shocks that will test the resilience of forest‑dependent communities across the South.
For further information: Austin Lamica, Rajan Parajuli, Consuelo Brandeis, Evaluating hurricane impacts on timber Markets in the Southeastern United States: A case of hurricane Michael, Forest Policy and Economics, Volume 178, 2025, 103590, ISSN 1389-9341, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2025.103590.
