"I couldn’t really picture that weight. It’s like five circus elephants. Or 50-something grand pianos."
"It was a beautiful tree, it really was, but I kind of have a difficult feeling about it right now."
Said Eben Burgoon, after a 65,000-pound redwood fell on his house, quoted in "Trees were a California city’s salvation. Now they’re a grave threat" (WaPo).
Sacramento was once called "the 'city of Plains' because of its treeless vistas," but it became "The City of Trees" after the humans worked to develop a lush, shady canopy. But:
Stressed from years of severe drought, tree roots naturally die back. When this is followed by day after day of big storms and the soil becomes saturated, the weakened roots fail as anchors. Trees whose roots have already been damaged by construction, such as fresh concrete sidewalks being laid down, are especially at risk of collapse. So are trees with shallow roots that rely on sprinklers for irrigation.
During the recent storms, the Sacramento Tree Foundation found that wind direction compounded the problem. In the city and the surrounding suburbs, trees are accustomed to dealing with winds from the south, and they have built-in defenses. But when strong northerly winds arrived on New Year’s Eve — with gusts that reached more than 60 miles per hour — they pummeled the trees on their most vulnerable side....
Should the city have planted all these trees? Did it make sense at the time and now the wonderful "salvation" has been ruined by climate change or were all these trees always vulnerable to toppling with an unlucky combination of dryness and rain?
I'm trying to understand the use of the word "salvation" in the headline. It doesn't appear in the text of the article. Why are trees "salvation"? If the natural environment of a place is "treeless vistas," why not embrace treeless vistas? If the trees fall, they are falling not to nature but to human folly.
The scientists are suggesting that, instead of "eucalyptus trees, cedars, redwoods, pines, evergreen oaks, Italian cypress and acacias," the fallen trees should be replaced with trees better adapted to the local conditions: "desert willow, netleaf hackberry and the Texas ebony." I had to look up those recommended trees — they all grow only to something like 30 feet. That's not going to give the city the "salvation" of a lush canopy.
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