Some Northwest Residents See Trees Differently After Storm

SEATTLE, Jan. 7 — Douglas fir. Western hemlock. Western red cedar. They are trees the way Tiger Woods is a golfer and Ethel Merman was a singer and Richard Pryor was funny and Bill Gates is rich.

Aspiring rivals flail beneath them. Gravity, yielding more than 200 feet to some trunks, seems to have signed a lifetime waiver.

Then came the stunning winds of Dec. 14 and 15. At speeds just shy of 70 miles an hour in Seattle and beyond 110 m.p.h. in the Cascade Range to the east, they knocked the Puget Sound region on its back, leaving more than a million people without power, tens of thousands for more than a week. The winds weapons, more often than not, were the great evergreens, slamming onto power lines, houses, cars and roads.

Ive never seen so much tree damage in my career, said John Hushagen, a longtime arborist here.

In the weeks after the storm, Mr. Hushagen and other tree experts here in perhaps the nations most wooded metropolitan region have been wildly busy, dashing from house to house to extract trees from roof trusses, peel them off driveways and, once the chain saws are at rest, try to predict for nervous homeowners whether one more good gust might take down yet another giant.

In the process, some have also become deeply concerned, worried that there may be more lasting damage to the relationship — not too strong a word in the Evergreen State — some people have with the trees around them. Now some tree experts have begun a kind of informal counseling campaign intended to restore trust, or at least the willingness to risk being hurt again.

People get tired of the trees falling on their property and on their roofs, and they just want them all cut down, said Sarah Griffith, the urban forestry program manager with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. We say, Hey, this tree just survived 80 m.p.h. winds. Its going to be O.K.

In the first desperate days after the storm, the King County division of Water and Land Resources urged restraint.

Many trees have been lost to the windstorm, Greg Rabourn, a project manager with the agency, said in a news release at the time, and we dont want to lose many more to bad advice or hysteria.

There is no count of how many trees were lost in the storm. Whatever the total, it is sawdust compared with the mountainsides worth clear-cut over a century of logging in the Pacific Northwest and the development of recent decades that has pushed people eastward from Seattle onto golf course communities carved from second- and third-growth timber farms.

And by all accounts the storm itself was unusual, shooting record wind gusts at trees whose roots were particularly vulnerable, having been saturated and destabilized by weeks of record rain.

Still, tree experts say, the storm also revealed hidden weaknesses in the trees, symptoms, they say, of development and neglect. They cite trees that toppled because their roots had been severed or shrunk by development; trees once safely flanked in a forest but left fatally exposed as remnants in housing developments; and trees with poor and hasty pruning, perhaps intended to expand a view of the Cascades or the Olympic Mountains or prevent a tree from falling.

The damage comes as cities across the country are encouraging tree planting to enhance shade and property value and to counter climate change with the cooling and carbon dioxide consumption that trees provide.

It also comes after many cities around Puget Sound have strengthened ordinances against cutting down trees, which some people are now using to accuse the cities and King County of contributing to the storm damage.

Bob LaBouy, whose house on a golf course in suburban Redmond Ridge became a kind of news spectacle after it was hit by 10 trees, said one tree that hit his house had a tag, placed by an arborist not long before the storm, that said it should be watched for signs of weakness but did not have to be immediately removed.

I pulled the tag off and said, You can take that off your two-to-three-year watch list, Mr. LaBouy said.

The Seattle suburbs for the most part are richer with evergreens than the city itself, and the suburbs suffered the greater loss of trees, and more power failures. The suburbs also are where much of the residential growth is, including from newcomers unaccustomed to living among huge trees.

Doug Schindler, director of special projects for the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, which works with developers and environmentalists to preserve forested land along Interstate 90 from Seattle through the Cascades, said the storm had not rattled the longtime locals he works with in the distant suburbs.

To them, thats what happens: you have storms, and trees fall down, and you lose power, Mr. Schindler said. Rivers rise, and you have floods, and thats part of the wonder of living in the natural world. And theyre ready for that. Part of the problem youre finding now is more and more urban people are moving into rural areas.

For the newcomers, he said, The forest out there is a cute thing, but when its crashing down around you its a little different.

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