WATERFORD — Maine has probably some 500 lakes filled with logs sunk after hurricane blow-downs, Matthew Albrecht, owner of River Drive Lumber in Scarborough, said.

The company intends to harvest some of those logs in Bear Pond next summer.

“There’s a lot of wood in a lot of places,” Albrecht said. He is headed to unspecified lakes and ponds in Fryeburg, Bridgton and Bethel this fall to investigate possible retrieval of sunken logs.

The problem, he said, is locating the water bodies where the trees are stored. To date, he has been unable to secure a list of ponds and lakes designated for hurricane timber storage.

“It’s all about research. You have to find the clues of where the old sawmills were. Maine has a well documented history but you have to hunt for (the designated lakes),” he said.

There is no known list of those that were used to dump the hurricane blow-downs, not even in a 500-page report from the U.S. Forest Service about the hurricane timber.

What is known, he said, is that following the powerful, fast-moving hurricane that roared into New England in late September of 1938, 35 percent of New England’s total land area damaged. Maine hired residents, largely women, to salvage the trees and cut them into log lengths that were later sunk. The move was primarily to reduce the danger of forest fires.

According to the U.S. Forest Service report, more than 50,000 board feet of trees were felled and about 45,000 were salvageable.

The Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration crews were used in the hazard removal and cleanup efforts.

The Northeastern Timber Salvage Administration was created to salvage the usable timber, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Women were hired in Maine and elsewhere because the war effort was getting under way and men were preparing for it.

The U.S. Forest Service reported that the 1938 hurricane most greatly influenced the long-term makeup of the New England forest landscape.

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