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The sky was clear on September 21, 2004, as Harris Township, Minnesota, maintenance workers Kenneth Johnson, 42, and James Booth, 40, drove their pickup truck down Lakeview Drive near Lake Pokegama. They had no idea that 10 yards off the road a 50-foot oak was set to fall and crush them to death. To the untrained eye, the tree looked fine. "It had green leaves on it, but once it fell, you could see the inside was really rotted through," says Dennis Kortekaas, the township board's former chairman.Instances of trees smashing into moving vehicles are rare, but anecdotal evidence says they're increasing. Federal highway statistics show trees killed, at most, one person a year between 1999 and 2003, but Reader's Digest found five tree-related deaths in 2004 alone, and serious crashes in New Jersey, Virginia, Tennessee and Louisiana. One of the worst was in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
About 6 p.m. on April 19, 2004, Stephen Spruck, his wife, Suzana Dedivanaj-Spruck, and their 6-month-old daughter, Kristina, were headed home on the Saw Mill River Parkway when a 50-year-old ash crashed onto their Toyota 4Runner. Crushed like a tinfoil ball, the SUV veered off the road, rolling several times before coming to an upside-down stop. Stephen and Suzana were dead. Kristina, strapped into her car seat, survived with minor injuries.
School principal Tatiana Ferraro was coming from the opposite way when she saw the tree begin to fall. "It was like watching something in slow motion," she says.
After the crash, Frank Buddingh, a local arborist, contacted the state transportation department to offer his expertise. Upon meeting with state officials, Buddingh says, he was amazed to find that New York didn't have a standard protocol for tree evaluation. On the drive home, he reports, he spied some 300 trees in need of removal: "They were either dead or dying, and potentially able to collapse. Trees like that weigh tons; they'll penetrate your car like a spear."
Transportation department spokesman Robert Dennison disputes Buddingh's claim. In New York's Hudson Valley region (which includes the Saw Mill parkway), Dennison says, workers cut down 5,000 trees each year. (Citing pending litigation, he declined comment on the tree that killed the Sprucks or on eyewitness accounts of extensive tree-removal work on the parkway after the accident.)
The tree trouble is sure to get worse, says Bruce Fraidech, a vice president at Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories in Charlotte, North Carolina, because many of those planted as the suburbs began to form after World War II are nearing their end. The problem has grown dire enough to attract government scrutiny. Joseph O'Brien, a United States Department of Agriculture plant pathologist in Minnesota, and several colleagues began to detect an uptick in tree failures several years ago. They responded by compiling the first comprehensive guide for communities to manage tree risk. Since its 2003 publication, nine municipalities have convened workshops on how to use the manual.
O'Brien notes that when budgets are tight, tree care isn't always a priority. Not so in Greenburgh, New York. Two years ago, the town paid $9 million to settle a tree-related lawsuit. Now, says town supervisor Paul Feiner, the town spends more than $100,000 a year on inspecting and removing trees, and residents are urged to report troubled trees. What do they look for? Dead branches; big cracks in the trunk; missing or sunken bark; small, off-color leaves; and exposed or damaged roots. Says Feiner: "Who would've thought that in addition to worrying about a nearby nuclear plant and being the target of terrorism, we'd have to worry about trees?"
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