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Fall Cankerworm
2020

What Every Homeowner Needs to Know About Their Aging Trees

You Don’t Know Where Your Going Until You Know Where You Have Been

Hurricane Michael October 12, 2018

Michael hit a few days ago and I lost power for about five hours and also some of current work. I have gone to my backups and am posting a few photos. Will come back later to add notes. The location of this particular Willow Oak is at the intersection of Radcliff Ave and Queens Road West.  There were several other trees up the street from this location that also fell on houses. I took photos of them also. In all cases for these photos is that the roots do not have good anchorage and there is root decay in every case.  This first tree below had a very heavy slab of concrete walkway that was helping to hold the tree down.  The stump sat for about two months with just the roots exposed, and then several weeks ago someone came to finish the job and, remove the slab.  I know the city was overwhelmed, and in this case there were some utilities very close by the stump hole.  That situation had to be cleared up before the sidewalk could be repaired. (I am editing this on March 7,2019).

Same tree as above different direction.  This is not really such a large tree.

This one is over in Dilworth.  Interesting information later.

Below is a White Oak on Selwyn Avenue in Myers Park that uprooted during Hurricane Michael.  The tree had a full crop of acorns at the time it fell. That extra weight might have helped cause the tree to uproot.  There was a straight line uprooting at the base of the porch and there were none of very few roots under the porch, so there was little root support from that direction.

Below is the same white oak.  If a tree uproots next to a sidewalk, curb, irrigation trench, etc. we refer to it as a Straight Line Uprooting.  What this signifies is that there was little or no anchorage where the straight line occurs.

Hurricane Michael occured on October 11th or 12th 2019 depending where you where.  This tree is fairly close to Queens University, and at one time there were many white oaks ( Quercus phellos alba ) in the neighborhood.  This tree was probably here when the house was built or the porch added.  I was too close to the house for the tree to develop a good root system.  It fell because it did not have good anchorage.  A factor that also affected the tree was that the acorn crop was very large and consequently extremely heavy.  The ground was also soft because of Hurricane Michael, but also Hurricane Florence that arrived earlier in the month.

looking for photos of white oak acorns from selwyn ave.