In addition to 16,000 professional soldiers and 8,000 civilian employees, the Austrian Armed Forces consist of an average of 6,000 conscripts and can mobilize up to 31,000 militia soldiers in the event of an operation. Three to four of these 61,000 members of the armed forces together form the forestry unit of the Carinthian military command.
The area of responsibility is extensive: two to three conscripts from the construction and pioneer platoon of the military command staff company support the forestry team in their work. The conscripts are graduates of the forestry school and do part of their practical training in this way. “In the army, someone always has to be the commander, but I am part of the forestry team and together we are a team,” says Christian Peturnig (top picture, 2nd from left), who is a trained forester.
The tasks range from tree care in the Carinthian barracks, the removal of damaged wood (due to snow breakage, windthrow or bark beetle infestation) with subsequent reforestation, firewood processing for the troops, thinning and roof construction for “container villages”, to road construction in the army’s own forests and on training grounds. And during assistance missions after natural disasters, such as in 2018 in the Gail, Lesach and Möll valleys, the forestry team supported the Villach pioneers in the clean-up work.
The Austrian Armed Forces own a total of 180 hectares of forest in Carinthia, which must be managed. So there is always something to do: The military command’s forestry team has already felled around 3,000 cubic meters this year, of which around 2,500 cubic meters were damaged wood. The felled wood is used as firewood for the troops, while the logs are processed at the army sawmill in Hochfilzen in Tyrol for army construction projects throughout Austria. “This year, there was some work to be done on Iselsberg, where a seminar center of the Austrian Armed Forces is located,” explains Peturnig. “Among other things, we had to fell a large spruce tree as there was a risk that it could fall onto one of the residential buildings in the next storm.” The spruce was felled with the help of a telescopic loader with a work basket from Villach’s Pioneer Battalion 1 and then transported to the sawmill in Lienz. Around 2,300 solid cubic meters of damaged wood were felled in the army’s own forests around the seminar center and partially reforested. “Beforehand, we built a path for the removal of the felled tree trunks,” explains the army forest warden.
Click here to see the other portraits in our “One of 61,000” series.
