Volunteers to plant chestnuts at Flight 93 site

Volunteers to plant chestnuts at Flight 93 site

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Later this month volunteers will plant hybrid American chestnuts on 20 acres of the Flight 93 Memorial as part of a project to reintroduce the trees that were nearly wiped out by blight over the last century.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports the planting at the Somerset County site is part of a broader effort to reforest hundreds of thousands of acres of land cleared by surface mining.

The Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative is partnering with the American Chestnut Foundation to put blight-resistant varieties of the once-thriving trees in former surfacing mining sites from Pennsylvania to Alabama.

The hybrid trees are a result of cross-breeding the domestic variety with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts.

A blight fungus that arrived with the Chinese chestnuts nearly eliminated the domestic variety by the mid-20th century.