When storms cause damage over a wide geographical area, people tend to develop a general sense of apprehension, even fear, about trees. This is especially true for homeowners. Our trees grow very tall, and very quickly in Atlanta. They can be intimidating especially when you are standing under one.
To me a storm can seem like a wake-up call. Are my trees still safe? Will my house get it next time? After seeing how many trees failed this week, I made the decision to now remove a tree in my own yard - one that in the past, I've accepted a level of risk that was little higher than I would typically tolerate. But it is only one, and I have plenty left.
I wonder how many healthy trees will be removed because of fear. To conserve a natural resource requires planning and action, and that includes risk management. Risk management doesn't just mean that you remove all risks - it simply means you have decided what risks you are willing to tolerate, and you remove the risks that fall short of being acceptable to you. Sometimes that means getting help from someone who is willing and interested in helping you do just that.
How many of us are willing to accept the real risk of driving on the interstate and getting in an auto accident, just so that we can get to work every morning?
During my "post-storm" review of fallen trees, I found some really scary tree conditions that could have been discovered through a basic visual inspection. Other problems were not so obvious, and there lies the randomness in a storm event. In Part 3, I will be posting some graphs of my defective tree findings. Don't miss it!
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Trees break. Trees snap. Trees fall.
Its the order of all things green. Trees are designed to grow, reproduce, and collapse. It is an inescapable fate.
This week's round of downdraft storms reminds us of the fragility of all plant life. Dr. Alex Shigo once called trees "the most massive, longest lived organisms on earth," yet eventually the old woody system fails so as to make way for the new. We manage, inspect, and care for the trees in our landscapes, but we just can't seem to predict when the strength of a storm will overtake the steadfastness of an oak.
Or can we?
These downdraft winds caused some of the most unusual tree damage I have seen in a long time. On the surface, the falling trees seemed to be inexplicably random. Loblollies snapped in half. Giant white oaks toppled over, pulling up hulking mounds of soil around their roots. Little dogwoods fell over into the lawns. Branches broke, and driveways were lifted. There did not seem to be a pattern, and the damage was widespread over a big geographical area. Seemingly firm-standing trees fell while neighboring weak trees were left standing.
So to make sense of things, I began taking notes each time a spotted a failed tree. I'm still recording, but the most interesting thing that I have noticed so far, is that the majority of failures occurred at, or near, a defective region of the tree. Even the most arbitrary of damage appears to have a reason.
Here's the hard part to accept: before the trees failed, many of the defective tree parts would have been visible to the experienced eye.
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