In addition to the boardwalks flooded, homes damaged and lives lost, Hurricane Sandy inflicted some less heralded casualties – thousands of roadside trees damaged or destroyed by the storm’s high winds.
But assistant professor of horticulture Jonathan Lehrer told the peninsula’s public officers at Wednesday night’s Great Neck Village Officials Association meeting that much of the damage was preventable.
Lehrer, who teaches at the State University of New York at Farmingdale, said it starts with choosing the right trees for the “urban forest.”
Past municipal planners’ decision to plant tall, brittle trees on roadsides left them vulnerable to extreme damage from storm-force winds, Lehrer said.
“The legacy of these bad choices have come back to haunt us,” he told the officials.
Lehrer said officials should look carefully at smaller, tougher varieties – or whether there should be trees in those areas at all – for villages looking to plant new trees or replace those lost in the storm,
“There’s going to be certain locations where installing a tree is not proper protocol,” he said.
The historic damage inflicted by Sandy was compounded by the use of street trees unsuited for such harsh conditions, Lehrer said. And the costs of those plantings have more than just aesthetic consequences. Tall, storm prone trees pose a threat to cars, homes and power lines if they are uprooted by wind.
The use of what Lehrer called “inappropriate” tree varieties, such as the silver maple, is due in part to officials choosing convenience over sound practice, the professor said. Quick growing trees, which some villages plant for speedier results, can often grow too tall for safety, Lehrer said.
“The inevitable result in may cases is it topples over,” he said.
Poor tree choice was compounded by a variety of factors that made Sandy even more devastating, Lehrer said. He said compacted soil and lack of sufficient space for root growth weakened trees, making them “ticking time bombs” capable of being felled by the storm.
“It was a confluence of really bad circumstances,” Lehrer said.
The meeting was attended by several local officials, including mayors from Great Neck Plaza, the Village of Great Neck, Kensington, Saddle Rock, members of the Great Neck Park Commission and state Sen. Jack Martins.
Officials asked Lehrer for advice on how to improve street trees in their village, and he suggested frequent examinations of trees for rot, damage and potential danger.
“It’s my view that the trees that are growing downtown need to be evaluated on a fairly regular basis,” Lehrer said. Those evaluations had often been neglected in the years before Sandy, Lehrer said.
Martins asked Lehrer how municipalities should cope with existing trees that may be too tall for safety during storms.
The professor recommended a commitment to tree maintenance – an expense he said is often neglected when villages face a budget crunch.
When we install a tree, it has to be realized that this is not a plant-it-and-forget-it situation,” Lehrer said.
