Disconsolate

Edge Hill Road at the entrance to my preserve after the ice storm

My preserve was smack dab in the center of the recent Mid-Atlantic ice storm that caused 715,000 customers in the counties surrounding Philadelphia to lose electric power for days on end.  After an 8-inch snowfall Tuesday night into Wednesday morning (February 4-5), the precipitation changed to sleet, which coated everything and caused the havoc.  Our electric power went off at 4 a.m. Wednesday morning, and power was not restored until Sunday afternoon, February 9.  We were without heat, water, and lights for 105 hours.

Kali and I "camped out" in the living room near the wood stove for the duration.  We brought the two cats (who don't like one another) into the room with us, along with our parrot (in his cage, of course).  We all got as close to the stove as we dared.  Despite our tribulations, though, we had it better than many folks in the area because at least we had a stove and firewood; many other customers just shivered in their houses, some of which got down very near freezing day after day.

This storm was second only to Hurricane Sandy (August 2012) in terms of the number of electric customers affected.  Utility crews from all over the eastern United States and eastern Canada descended onto us in an effort to restore power.  Our service was restored by a crew from Georgia Power (who had just come from their own ice storm nightmare two weeks ago).

Some of the non-native firs and spruces in the preserve held up fairly well to snow cover

A white pine just inside our driveway that, like most of the white pines on the property, suffered many broken limbs

Having been largely housebound for nearly five days, Kali and I decided to walk two of the trails in the preserve on Sunday afternoon after the power was restored to get an idea of the damage.  It wasn't a pleasant walk because the snow was covered by a sheet of ice, which made walking very difficult.  In addition, the trails were interrupted end to end by downed branches, so we had to detour repeatedly.

A trail runs down the center of this allee of white pines

Kali detouring around a fallen tree blocking the trail

Though there was a lot of damage, whole topped trees like the fir in the image above were actually pretty uncommon - certainly far less common than they were in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.  Most of the woody debris consisted of large branches and limbs that cracked off the canopy of the trees, but the majority of the trees themselves were spared.

If storms like Hurricane Sandy and this ice storm continue to strike the preserve with regularity, there won't be anything left to preserve.  The trees will be damaged or killed, and then sunlight will stream into the woods and allow invasive vines to overwhelm the forest.  It's all very discouraging.

A Belated Casualty

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy last year, I noticed that a "crack" had developed in the soil between a huge, old tuliptree (Liriodenron tulipifera) and the edge of one of the trails in my preserve.  The storm had undoubtedly tilted the tree up a bit, but not enough to tip it over.  (The trail adjacent to which the tree was growing had been a public road until 1984 when our organization petitioned the municipalities in the area to close and abandon several roads so that the right-of-ways could be incorporated into the trail network in the growing preserve.  About three miles of roads were abandoned, much to the delight of the municipalities, I'm sure, because they didn't have to maintain these troublesome, flood-prone dirt roads any longer.  But I digress.)

The soil "crack," a few inches wide and about two feet long, appeared to be stable.  Kali and I walk the trail frequently and hadn't noticed any changes during the months following the storm.  Then, last week, our area received three periods of very heavy rain.  After the first deluge, one of our members telephoned on his cell phone to say, "I'm on the Creek Road Trail, and a huge tree has fallen away from the trail."  When the call came in, I knew which tree had fallen over.

Last evening, about a week after the tree toppled, Kali and I walked the trail to inspect the damage and take some photographs. Fortunately, as the caller had said, the tree had fallen away from the trail, but the root ball had torn up half the trail surface.  In the interval between the tree's falling and our walk, my staff had built a wooden retaining wall and repaired the trail surface with crushed stone.

As everywhere else we lost trees to Hurricane Sandy, we'll now have to do battle with the sun-loving invasive plants that will quickly colonize this gap in the forest canopy.  Tuliptrees are not valuable for lumber, so we'll just let the tree decompose over time in place.  And, as the limbs and branches decompose, we'll plant new trees to replace this regal giant.