Trees and the August 9 Storm, cont’d.

So, what about the trees? I hadn’t had a chance to go hiking since the storm and didn’t see many trees down while driving around town so I just assumed there wasn’t much of that kind of damage. I was wrong. On a recent hike through the forest near my house, I found plenty of trees down, some yanked right out of the ground, root ball and all and others snapped off. A good number of these trees were quite large and had weathered many a storm before succumbing to this one; it was obvious that it had been particularly violent.

An undisturbed forest with few holes in its canopy can usually weather storms pretty well. This is because any particular tree can only bend as far as the tree next it and that tree as far as the one next to it and so on, providing a natural stopping point for each. However, where there are holes in the canopy, some trees have nothing to ‘lean on’, and, especially, from late spring through early fall when they are fully leafed out, powerful winds can catch a tree top and bend it so far that something has to give – it either uproots or the trunk snaps. The forest near my house had been selectively logged in the not too distant past and obviously suffered the consequences of holes in its canopy from this storm.

In contrast, yesterday I had a chance to walk through some old-growth forest, untouched by the hand of man. This forest is full of magnificent trees, some with trunks three, four and even five foot wide and attaining heights of over 100 feet – here the canopy was mostly unbroken. What a difference. I had to look hard to find any damage from the storm at all.

But I did notice something weird that affected both forests - the ground had been swept clean in many places, the leaves and branches that usually litter a forest floor were gone, even on gentle slopes –somehow it just looked naked. I have hiked in forests a gazillion times in my life and had never seen such a clean sweep; the storm rainfall rate and quantity must have been incredible. According to the National Weather Service, the town of Perrysburg (near Gowanda where there were devastating floods) received six inches of rain in about an hour and a half – an amount and rate on par with hurricanes and tropical storms!

So where did all the leaves and branches go? Into the gullies and ravines. There, I found great tangles caught on tree trucks, roots and rocks; in some places the piles were as tall as me! The storm of August 9 significantly changed the look and feel of local forest landscapes for some time to come.