Coeur d’Alene’s Trees: A Cautionary Tale
Having been an experimental physicist in my younger days, I decided a little data might shed some light on the debate over Coeur d’Alene’s trees … whether to hug them or to hate them. The lower 24 feet of the large Ponderosa that fell near 10th Street on Front Avenue recently hadn’t yet been removed so I took advantage of the situation and made some measurements.
The upper end of the tree’s trunk is a little over 4 feet in diameter. There are 125 rings, as best as I could count. That places it as a seedling in 1895. By counting rings and measuring their distance from the center it appears the tree was 15 inches in diameter in 1920, contemporary with the houses in the area. By 1990 it was 40 inches in diameter. It’s now 52 inches, so that means in the last 30 years it has increased by 12 inches. Looking at the yearly growth rate over the entire lifetime of the tree, this is typical … 3 to 5 inches per decade, evidently depending on weather conditions.
What does all that mean? Well folks, these trees are still growing! Every year they get wider and taller. And they are getting a larger diameter foliage cluster near the top. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that most of these trees are hemmed in by concrete so there is little opportunity for the root structure to expand. So, those trees that just withstood last week’s winds may very well not withstand identical winds in the years to come. At some point one-by-one they will fall. It’s the consequence of Coeur d’Alene being in an aging forest.
When we moved here and bought a home on property south of Post Falls a little over 20 years ago, I began removing trees that were a wind hazard. Part of our deck was actually built around a couple of them! I’m still at it, but I’m getting there and so far we’ve kept ahead of the winds (and fires). We’re fortunate in not having to deal with a city council and we can choose to protect our property as we see fit. We’ve planted new trees and other greenery to preserve and enhance our property’s natural beauty.
It seems that Coeur d’Alene’s City Council might need a similar non emotional data-driven plan, recognize the situation and begin to remove the largest trees and replace them with new ones. Living in parts of Coeur d’Alene is like having a home on the side of a Hawaiian volcano, or living next door to a homicidal sociopath … at some point things are going to go south. You can count on it! Coeur d’Alene is a beautiful city and its citizens deserve to be safe.
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Paul Temple is a Post Falls resident.
