Many More Damaged Missoula Trees Will Have to Come Down

Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - On Friday’s City Talk edition of Talk Back, one of the in-studio guests was Marie Ducharme, Urban Forestry Program Specialist with the City of Missoula,

I asked Ducharme if there were even more urban trees that had been damaged by Wednesday night’s storm that did not immediately come crashing to the ground.

Expert says up to 75 Percent of Missoula's Urban Forest was Impacted

“I was out yesterday doing exactly that, trying to inventory and kind of get an idea of what we were looking at,” began Ducharme. “We currently have about 40,000 trees in our city inventory, and of all the streets, I didn't see a single block that didn't have some damage. A conservative estimate at this point is, I would say at least 75 percent of our urban forests; both public and private trees were impacted.”

Ducharme said in her many years of serving the city, she had never seen such devastation.

Ducharme said She has Never Seen This Level of Damage from One Storm

“I have been with the city for 19 years, and I've never seen this level of impact on our Urban Canopy,” she said. “This is going to take a very concerted effort and a long time frame to mitigate. We're going to lose a lot of trees, even if they're still standing. A lot of them were damaged to the point that we can't save them.”

I asked Ducharme how she can determine just how badly the trees have been damaged by the windstorm.

“The first thing that we're going to look at is the percentage of canopy left,” she said. “If more than 50 percent of the live canopy has been lost, that's going to up the probability of it being removed. Also structurally, that's going to be the big one. A lot of these trees that we saw yesterday had structural defects and they failed, and they failed to a degree that we can't retain the tree because it's just structurally unsound.”

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She said Trees were Already Drought-stressed and the Storm Made it Worse

Ducharme said Missoula’s trees were already drought-stressed, and Wednesday’s storm simply added insult to injury.

“A healthy tree is a resilient tree, and so if we have trees that are already stressed from drought and then we have this storm event, it's going to be much, much harder for them to come back from that,” she said. “The best thing that we can ask people to do right now is first and foremost, please be safe out there. As Morgan said, we do have a lot of failures still up in the (tree) crowns. So if you're walking around, biking around, please be very, very cognizant of what's above you. The other thing is once we do start getting a lot of this cleaned up, and we figure out what we can and can't prune and prune and retain; we just ask people to bear with us and keep watering.”

Missoula Mayor Andrea Davis also shared during City Talk that the Election Center on Russell is a place where those left without power can go for showers and other services.