A storm that lashed northern Europe at the weekend caused unprecedented damage to forests in Sweden and the Baltic states and now threatens to put hundreds of small forest owners out of business, industry officials said on Tuesday.
In Sweden, the country hardest hit by the storm where seven people died, the Federation of Forest Owners, Skogsaegarna, estimated Tuesday that 60 million cubic meters of wood were uprooted or damaged in just several hours overnight Saturday to Sunday, in what it called a "national catastrophe".
"That's the equivalent of four years of felling. And that's an average, which means that some small owners saw their entire property destroyed by the storm," federation chairman Christer Segersteen told AFP.
The damage to Swedish forests is the worst in 100 years, the National Board of Forestry said. In 1969, two storms led to the loss of 35 million cubic meters of wood.

According to paper of record Dagens Nyheter, the losses could amount to 15 to 30 billion kronor (1.6-3.3 billion euros, 2.1-4.3 billion dollars).
The impact is especially serious for forest owners who were not insured and whom the state will most likely not help, legal expert Karl-Aake Nybergh said.
"Sixty percent of forest owners are insured against natural catastrophes. But 40 percent have only taken out fire insurance. This is a nightmare for them," he said.
"They'll have to sell off the uprooted wood at the best price possible as soon as possible before it rots, and then clean up and replant," he said.
Rejected by sawmills, the prematurely felled wood will have to be sold to papermakers for half the price offered by the mills.
The storms caused major material damage and killed 14 people across Sweden, Ireland, Britain, Germany, Denmark and the Baltic countries.
Some feared the glut of wood on the market would bring down prices across Europe.
In Sweden, Skogsaegarna has asked its members to suspend felling in order to stabilize prices.
The same fear was expressed in Estonia, where at least one million cubic metres of wood came down during the storm, according to preliminary estimates by the Estonian state forest management centre.
Rait Hiiepuu, head of the Stora Enso Mets, the Estonian wood procurement subsidiary of Finnish company Stora Enso, told AFP prices "will go down everywhere because of over-supply, in particular in Sweden."
"Estonian firms will have a hard time selling timber to Scandinavian markets as they will first clear up their own damage."
But others said the storm could be a blessing in disguise for this important export product.
"More than 20 percent of the planned cutting of state forest for this year has already been made -- by the storms," Ulvar Kaubi, marketing manager of Estonia's forest management centre, told AFP.
He said the storm damage would help logging firms which have been having a bad year because of unseasonally warm and wet weather.
"As it has been very wet in the forests, conditions for felling have been extremely hard and there has been a shortage of timber on the market," he said.
"The timber firms can now move to the storm damage areas and start working, although conditions are still tough."
Forests cover more than half of Estonias territory, taking up 2.3 million hectares (5.7 million acres). Timber represents 23 percent of Estonia's exports.
Meanwhile, in Latvia the storm downed between two and five million cubic meters of wood, accounting for some 15 to 40 percent of annual tree-felling, the Baltic News Service (BNS) said citing initial estimates.
"This is a disaster because most of the timber taken down by the storm will be flooded into the market. The supply will be much higher than demand," Guntars Zvejsalnieks, the head of Swedish-owned Sveaskog Baltfor, a leading Latvian pulpwood exporter, told BNS.
Major wood buyers, such as Sweden's SCA and Roervik Timber, rejoiced on Tuesday as they saw their share prices rise by 2.6 and 12 percent respectively on the Stockholm stock exchange.
"In the short term we'll benefit. The supply of raw materials should be unlimited for a year. So our supply costs have plunged," Roervik Timber chief executive Johan Hansen told Swedish financial daily Dagens Industri.