One of Bath’s grand American elm trees, leafless and stricken with Dutch elm disease, was removed by local tree and crane service companies Thursday morning on Oak Grove Avenue.

While it’s sad to lose the estimated 80- year-old tree, if there is a bright side, the logs have been taken to a sawmill to be milled out as lumber for a future city project.

Dutch elm disease is a fungal disease spread by elm bark beetles. According to elmcare.com, scientists believe it originally came from the Himalayas and traveled to Europe from the Dutch East Indies in the late 1800s. In the 1930s, the disease spread to North America on wooden crates made with infected elm wood. The disease broke out again in 1945, destroying half the remaining elm trees in eastern Canada and the U.S.

Kyle Rosenberg, Bath’s arborist, said the elm tree and another next to it on Oak Grove Avenue were injected the same day a year ago with fungicide treatment. For some reason, this particular tree succumbed to Dutch elm disease. To be safe, the surviving tree will again be injected this week.

Elm trees have been injected by fungicides for about 30 years, though the ingredients have been upgraded over the years.

“American elms used to line city streets because they’re tolerant of being along the side of the road and they had that nice spreading canopy,” Rosenberg said. Since the peak of the disease in the 1970s, “we had to do more of this.”

Asked whether the state has a handle on the disease, Rosenberg said it depends on the municipality. It is in the landscape, he said, so communities have to be proactive in treating the trees. There are new varieties of elms that have been genetically modified to cope with Dutch elm disease, but many of those trees are still small.

“There are breeding programs that are hoping to finalize the strains of 100 percent resistant elm trees,” he said.

“My goal is to do our best to be ahead of any sort of problems,” Rosenberg said. “Of course, we’re being bombarded this year with browntail and we just found winter moth, which is another defoliator caterpillar.”

In southern New England, the winter moth has presented a challenge because it doesn’t have a preferred host and can go from an elm to a maple to a linden to a birch. The best thing the city can do right now is put a band of sticky goo around the trees in the fall to keep the female moths from crawling up the trees since they don’t fly.

The browntail moth caterpillars eat foliage too and produce toxic hairs as they mature, which cause rashes for many people. People can also experience respiratory distress from inhaling the microscopic hairs that blow around in the air.

There are a few large American elm trees remaining in Bath, Rosenberg said.

Taking the 90-foot tree down wasn’t anything near the largest or most challenging tree Hawkes Tree Service in Phippsburg has faced. On Thursday, arborist Jarrod Hawkes and his crew worked with Joe Williams of J.R. Williams Crane Service out of Woolwich.

Williams and Hawkes came to look at the tree ahead of time to make a plan for how they’d take it down. Williams said he had to be careful maneuvering the crane because the tree was near high voltage power lines. The tree bordered the edge of Oak Grove Cemetery and stood only feet from a headstone. The only safe way to get it down was with a crane, he said.

As Williams operated the boom, Hawkes used a scissor lift to rise high into the branches and attach the straps to the different sections of branches so the crane could maneuver them once he cut them free. The two communicated mainly through hand signals. Once the strap was secure, Hawkes started up the chain saw and cut another section of tree.

“It’s very controlled, and it’s done sort of in a gentle manner as much as possible,” Hawkes said. “No swinging and sliding around. We try to get everything to run smoothly and get everyone to work together well, and we’ve done lots of trees with Joe.”

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