The Trees That Fell
A Post Mortem of Portland's Massive Tree Failure
Hello All!
First of all, a HUGE thank you to everyone who has already completed the survey I sent out last week. It was so amazing to get your thoughts, feedback, and ideas. In a couple weeks, I’ll send out a summary of responses, but from basic observations, I can say this:
There is energy and interest for something more from this community for many of you.
Many of you are already pretty solidly prepared.
A lot of you have SO MUCH to offer to this community which is exactly why I want to move toward a less one-sided way of communication.
A lot of you all struggle with navigating how to take climate action.
Community preparedness is a much harder aspect of preparedness that we all could use some discussion around.
Additionally, in the notes, I see that many of you have unique skills and expertise that can benefit this community. Whether you’re in the mental health field, a researcher, you have a unique skill or story, or you’ve gone through your own journey of preparedness, I would love to collaborate with you in some way. It’s clear you have something to offer this community, so if you’re interested in exploring what that could look like, you can email me at crammingfortheapocalypse@gmail.com.
And…it’s not too late to take the survey!
If you haven’t taken the survey yet, there’s still time to do so! The more people I hear from, the more details I have for next steps. You can take that survey here:
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And now, onto my reflections on the trees we have lost.
We in Portland are just emerging from a week-long snow and ice storm. The week of arctic weather that coated our streets and sidewalks with a half-inch layer of ice began not with deep snow, but with frigid temperatures and a windstorm. The high, whipping winds brought down an extraordinary number of trees in the Portland Metro region. Watching social media last weekend (Jan 12th and 13th) was like watching a massive forest coming down almost all at once just dispersed throughout the city. The local news channel says the tree death toll is around 675. My brother-in-law, Kyle Offerdahl, who’s an arborist and president of General Tree Service here in Portland thinks it’s probably a lot more than that.
“I haven’t seen anything like this before and I’ve worked after hurricanes,” Kyle told me the other day. He and his team have been working non-stop since last Saturday to do their best to respond to the hundreds of calls they’ve been receiving about trees falling on people’s homes. That kind of tree failure is something you tend to see on a much smaller scale. In storms like this, yes there will most definitely be more tree damage, but this kind of mass tree failure is almost unheard of. Alas, with the changing climate, it seems like this kind of strange occurrence is bound to happen more and more.
Of course, there’s a preparedness message in here. So many of the homes where the trees fell will be uninhabitable for months. Some friends who live in an area in Southwest Portland that was quite devastated by falling trees were lucky in this storm, but three years ago a massive cedar fell on their home and they had to be out of their house for nearly a year while it was repaired. And their tree fall didn’t happen at a time when hundreds of other trees would be falling. I can only imagine what it’ll be like for these families when there are hundreds of homes needing repairs over the coming months. Preparedness is about what you might have stored in your home, but it’s also preparedness on a personal level where there are resources available in a community that can help these families pick up the pieces. It’s a lesson in community resilience.
But there’s also a climate lesson here which is what I’ve been pondering as I watch the videos of trees falling. I was so curious about why so many trees failed at once. Was it because of climate change? Were these trees already dying because of the changing weather and climate conditions? Certainly that is a huge concern here in the region where we’re starting to see native trees being affected by the longer dry seasons than this area is used to. Christina Buhl, a forest entomologist from the Oregon Department of Forestry is researching this and finding that the western redcedar and douglas fir trees are being severely affected not necessarily by the high temperatures, but the length of time the high temperatures and dry conditions are happening.
Interestingly, though, it seems that this particular event in Portland is not related to the die-off or failure of trees from climate change. Rather is more about the seemingly anomalous weather patterns we’re experiencing for this region.
When I talked to Kyle after he’d been out all week responding to calls of trees on houses, literally watching trees fall and fail (and in some cases walking door-to-door to tell people they should evacuate because of the tree fall risk), he told me it wasn’t necessarily about the trees failing.
“It’s more of a soil failure,” he said. “Some of the trees that failed were healthy, but the low temperatures which caused a flash freeze potentially caused a separation of soil layers. What appeared to happen is that the humus layer froze, and the sublayer was still saturated with water below [from the weeks of torrential rain we had]. Then micro-gusts, that had ice in them, created tremendous loading in the canopy, which translated into a tremendous amounts of leverage on the frozen tree root plate. The loading was too much and the soil failed.” And when the soil fails, the tree has nothing keeping it up. The strangest thing Kyle saw is the amount of healthy trees that fell in the storm. He suspects this was due to their robust growth above the canopy which had more surface area for the wind and ice to catch.
This was so fascinating to me because it seemed like this was not a preventable situation. In most cases, homeowners can prevent a tree falling and it usually comes down to having an arborist check out the big trees on your property to assess their risk. If a tree is dying or is dead, it has a much higher likelihood of falling in even a small gust. I’ve become particularly paranoid about this risk because in the past five years, I’ve had two friends impacted by trees falling on their houses. We have a big western redcedar in our backyard where I’ve asked Kyle probably a million times if we have anything to worry about. And we don’t…for now. But with the increase in temperatures and the reports that native trees like my western redcedar are beginning to fail because of the long, hot summers, I imagine there are going to be more of those circumstances.
But this last week’s mass falling of trees seems unpreventable unlike the typical tree fall situation. The mass die-off of native trees is alarming in and of itself. But then you add the incredibly strange weather and you get a whole level of uncertainty about these essential pieces of nature.
When Kyle and I talked and I was trying to make sense of this strange phenomenon from the last week, he was pondering how climate change might affect the trees he works with and loves so much.
“There are several different ways to look at the way climate affects trees,” says Kyle. “There are mechanical failures from these big loading events [like the one we just experienced]. You can almost call that acute weather events versus a chronic climate change issue.” The chronic climate change issue would be the long drought seasons. The acute events would be the strange weather events like the one in Oregon.
This massive tree—or I suppose soil–failure event—has prompted Kyle and other arborists around the country to begin talking about what these kinds of acute events mean for arboriculture. What should they be looking for and preparing people for in the event that these kinds of “big loading events” as he calls it happen again? And they will. These kinds of events are happening more frequently. They are becoming the norm and it needs to be taken into account when assessing trees and potential tree damage.
“Maybe this is how these things start to change,” says Kyle. “The way we used to manage trees used to not account for weather events outside of normal cyclical. We now have to incorporate higher wind speeds into assessments. Before we’d say that tree was healthy, we might have to think outside the box for solutions for the tree that protects.”
It’s both scary and sad to see this many trees go down. With trees being such an essential part of our world, it’s not just the massive amount of logging that is happening that will devastate forests and urban tree canopies, it is these kinds of events that could affect them as well.
Kyle reflects on the personal sense of loss that he feels that encapsulates the feelings around it. “As someone who sees trees differently, it’s a bummer seeing heritage trees go down and knowing there’s nothing we can do,” he says.
While we’re going to continue to see more of these types of events, what we can do at least is help keep the climate from changing even more than it already has in the best ways we personally know how.