Extensive tree damage after weekend snowstorm

Coeur d'Alene city officials say that, while most of the damage left behind after Friday’s and Saturday’s historic snowstorm will be removed by the end of this week, they have no timetable for when all the fallen trees and branches will be cleaned up.

“This is going to take some time,” Nick Goodwin, urban forester for Coeur d’Alene, said. “Our street department staff is out there right now clearing sidewalks of debris. They’ve been clearing roadways and sidewalks for some time. Our parks department is working hard to get hazardous limbs removed as fast and as safely as possible. We’re all working hard to get things back to normal.

“But,” Goodwin added, “there are a lot of trees out there.”

How many trees is still up in the air, as Goodwin said teams are still assessing damage. The snowstorm that rolled in Friday morning spent two days dropping as much as 8 inches of snow across Kootenai County. Crippling cold weather turned wet snow into ice, weighing a heavier burden on tree limbs. Trees and branches across North Idaho snapped and fell Friday, downing power lines and cutting power to thousands of Kootenai County residents. Avista and Kootenai Electric both had crews responding to outages throughout the weekend. Avista sent a release Monday that it had completed storm-related restorations earlier in the day.

“We’re probably going to see a lot of total losses,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin, who has been with the city for more than nine years, said the combination of a long summer, a late fall and generally calm weather made the weekend calamity — no pun intended — a perfect storm.

“Generally, I do see failure of limbs with wet, heavy snow,” he said. “But this really had the perfect conditions for the worst possible situation. We had a warm beginning of fall that kind of stretched on, so we really didn’t have a lot of cold snaps leading up to this. The trees reacted to that.”

Goodwin added that, because most trees still had — and have — their canopies, more snow was able to accumulate. Had the storm come even two weeks later, he said, the damage wouldn’t have been nearly as severe.

Goodwin said his office has received plenty of calls since the storm from apprehensive residents concerned larger trees on their properties might fall, doing even more damage. While he said he fields each call, he stresses that “big” and “dangerous” are two very different things.

“I want people to understand,” he said, “this storm was not a normal circumstance. We had a lot of trees fall because of some very abnormal conditions, and now we have people staring at these big trees in their yard, and they’re wondering if it’s going to fall on their house. Just because a tree is big and tall doesn’t mean it’s necessarily hazardous.”

A cost-sharing program for trees abutting residential single-family homes and planted in the public right-of-way is available through the city of Coeur d’Alene. Upon approval, the city will reimburse half the cost of pruning a tree up to $200 per tree, with a maximum of $600 per parcel. With further approval, the city will cover half the costs of tree removal, up to $400. Interested residents can visit the city’s website at www.cdaid.org/2747/departments/parks/urban-forestry/cost-share-program to apply.