Cason and Philip Wolcott chose to buy the house on a small Gresham side street because a large grove of majestic trees abutted its backyard.
When a neighbor died shortly after they moved in six years ago, they were among the local residents who successfully pushed for the city to buy her property, which abutted their backyard, and add the trees to an existing undeveloped city park rather than allowing a developer to cut them down.
“We had this beautiful green space behind us. We wanted the trees there,” Cason Wolcott said.
But earlier this month, as a weeklong ice-snow-and-wind storm launched its assault on the Portland area, the trees they had loved suddenly turned hostile.
“We were sitting on the couch, watching the trees sway and Philip started to yell, ‘This one’s us! This one’s us!’ and the tree cracked, turned and started falling,” Cason Wolcott recalled. The couple had just enough time to grab their two dogs and a cat and dive to the floor.
The tree landed with a thud in the kitchen, 5 feet away from the living room where they had been sitting, slicing the house in half. Debris rained down. Water gushed from broken pipes.
“It was like a bomb went off,” she said.
Ten days later, the two watched, still in disbelief, as a crane removed the massive tree trunk from what used to be their home.
“Now I understand the power of those trees. I’m not mad at them, but I’m a little hesitant to go back,” Cason Wolcott said.
The two aren’t alone in their newfound ambivalence. January’s storm felled hundreds of massive trees across the region. Falling trees killed an elderly man inside a Lake Oswego home and a woman trapped inside a Southeast Portland motor home, and they injured countless other residents. The trees crushed houses, cars, power lines and power poles, causing millions in property damage and tens of thousands of power outages.
In a place known for its lush green spaces, the experience of large trees collapsing on such a massive scale has led to a new anxiety about our coexistence with the cherished emblem of Portland and the region.
It has also led some to question their municipalities’ local tree rules and to call for more tree removal and even a change in the type of trees cities plant in the future.
“City leaders need to rethink tree codes and cap how big they allow these trees to be in urban areas,” former state Rep. Julie Parrish of West Linn, now a newly minted lawyer, tweeted last week. “Large stand-alone trees won’t withstand wind/ice, and they put lives in harm’s way when they fall.”
The damage has been all the more unsettling because many of the trees uprooted and damaged by the storm, according to arborists and local news reports, were Douglas firs, the region’s iconic tree and its most common conifer. The Douglas fir is Oregon’s official state tree, a powerful symbol that graces the state flag and most passenger car license plates.
After the storm, one user on the social platform Reddit presented a new state flag: It features a toppled Douglas fir.
MILLIONS DID NOT FALL
The city of Portland has more than 4 million trees – 218,000 street trees, 1.2 million park trees and 2.9 million trees on private property. The trees are a source of pride for the city, though Portland’s tree canopy has been shrinking in recent years, raising alarms.
During the recent storm, Portland’s Urban Forestry division received more than 700 reports of trees or large branches that fell onto roads and other city-managed property, said Mark Ross, a spokesperson with Portland Parks &…
This article was originally published by a www.oregonlive.com . Read the Original article here. .