Compte rendu d'essais pour la protection des bois contre les tarets

Among the organisms attacking submerged wood structures, ship worms play a predominant role. In one year, an untreated piece of wood can be totally invaded by these molluscs' galleries and lose more than 50 % of its weight. The hardest woods like azobé are easily attacked and there is no obvious advantage to building anything with such expensive materials. Impregnating wood with a toxic product can stop or delay the attack. As a consequence, a wood like pinaster, which can easily be impregnated, can have an equal or greater resistance than that of harder woods. Polychlorinated phenols stop or delay efficiently taret penetration but their action is increased when used with chlorinated hydrocarbons. In this case, the differences in protection seem to come from the volatility of these hydrocarbons; heavy hydrocarbons providing better results. Method II b, meeting these characteristics, proved very penetrating and efficient in reducing the attacks on wood pieces by an average of 5 %. However, this product does not have any antifouling action to prevent organisms from gripping onto the wood surface.