A CRUSHING LOSS
HAYDEN — The tree is not on Vicki Moffat’s house.
It is in her house.
The 32-inch diameter ponderosa pine that blew over Saturday morning — one of several in her Hayden yard and neighborhood — went through Moffat’s roof, broke trusses, cracked Sheetrock and is being prevented from doing further damage by a bearing wall.
“There’s no way to remove the stem without getting a crane in there,” Shawn Bennett of Grace Tree Service said.
But the crane has been postponed.
Moffat said Lakes Highway District has prevented Barnhart Crane and Rigging — the Spokane company that has helped out across North Idaho since Saturday’s storm removing trees from homes, mostly in Post Falls — from driving to the Hayden neighborhood.
“We can’t seem to get any access to the site,” Taylor Johnson of Barnhart Crane said Tuesday.
His company has been prevented, Johnson said, from moving a 100-ton crane to Moffat’s Haydenview neighborhood because the highway district and the city of Hayden have weight limits on roads.
The crane company has asked the entities to waive the restrictions, provide them with a variance, or to allow a smaller crane truck to get the tree trunk out of Moffat’s house.
By Tuesday — four days after the once-stately pine crashed through her roof — the trunk remained, and Moffat was getting nervous.
“It’s supposed to snow,” she said.
Eric Shanley, director of Lakes Highway District, said his department has attempted to work with the tree removal and the crane company since last weekend, when 50 mph gusts blew into the region, knocking out power, snapping and uprooting trees in a storm that lasted less than a day.
The storm, which came on the heels of a balmy week that melted the area’s snow and saturated the ground, made it easier for trees to tip over.
As a result, the district and Hayden restricted the use of trucks and heavy equipment — which can damage the surface — on its roads until the ground freezes or dries up.
Where Moffat lives, Shanley said his district paid $2 million to resurface the road last summer at the north end of 15th Street and into the heights overlooking Hayden.
“The original crane they wanted to use was two times the legal load limit during dry conditions,” Shanley said.
During emergencies, his district usually helps out by allowing trucks or machinery on the road, as long as the machinery doesn’t exceed too greatly the break-up restrictions that allow for 10,000 pounds on the front axle.
“We’ve had roads damaged significantly (that) had to be repaired,” Shanley said.
Johnson said his company has offered to bring a smaller, 30-ton crane to Moffat’s neighborhood to remove the tree from her house. By Tuesday morning Johnson was still waiting for the go-ahead.
“They denied both,” Johnson said. “We’re trying to get up there whenever we can.”
Shanley said it wasn’t only his district that Barnhart needed to contact for permission.
“There are other jurisdictions,” he said.
That includes Hayden, the Post Falls Highway District and maybe Coeur d’Alene, depending on the route the crane company chooses to reach Moffat’s house.
Johnson said he’s received permission from the sheriff’s office, as well as the Post Falls district.
“In emergencies they are pretty flexible,” he said.
The hang-up, he said, is closer to the problem site.
Bennett said his crews did as much as they could by limbing the pine, and topping it, but a crane was the only tool he didn’t possess to remove the massive trunk.
In the meantime, the snow that started falling Tuesday afternoon is expected to be followed by rain.
Moffat said a contractor secured a tarp over the massive hole in her roof, but the measure is likely not enough to prevent water damage in her house — if the weather forecast proves correct — in addition to the structural damage.
“The clock is ticking,” Bennett said.