You’re seeing more fallen trees, branches in Whatcom. It wasn’t the windstorm
Trees around Whatcom County were showing signs of poor health even before the late-summer windstorm that dropped limbs and littered streets with leaves and twigs.
Six months of below-normal rainfall and two suffocating heatwaves had turned many of their leaves from green to yellow and brown, making some areas appear like fall in mid-July, said meteorologist Brent Bower at the National Weather Service in Seattle.
“They were already drought-stressed, and then we had the incredible heatwave,” Bower told The Bellingham Herald in August.
John Tuxill, an ethnobotanist and associate professor at Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College, said local trees struggled to survive the early summer heatwave that sent temperatures soaring above 100 degrees.
“Part of what we’re seeing now is the aftermath of that heat dome at the end of June,” Tuxill told The Herald. “It’s the first time that I recall a big dieback in the Pacific Northwest relative to a specific event.”
Truxill said a tree will simply “cut its losses” during a heatwave and stop sending nutrients to every branch.
“We call it self-pruning,” Tuxill said.
And it’s one reason that Bellingham’s Parks and Recreation Department has been getting an unusually high number of calls for limbs and branches on trails and trees leaning near homes abutting park property, said parks Director Nicole Oliver.
“There’s been quite a few in the past couple of weeks. Our arborists have been very busy. There are a considerable amount of work orders,” Oliver told The Herald.
“What we’re seeing is the impact of drought on some of the conifers,” Oliver said.
Natural ‘thinning out’
Brian Boatman at Beavers Tree Service said the drought years of 2015-2016 weakened many trees, and the recent windstorm tore at limbs that were still full of leaves, adding to the damage.
But in general, he said it’s not worrisome for a few limbs or branches to fall.
“When the trees are breaking branches, it’s not the whole tree falling,” Boatman said. “It’s nature’s way of thinning out.”
Deadly consequences
But falling branches can be deadly.
Seven people have been killed by falling trees and branches in Whatcom County from 2000 to 2020, according to The Herald’s archives and the Whatcom County Medical Examiner’s annual reports.
Among them:
▪ A 5-year-old girl hiking with her parents was killed by a falling tree in 2005 on the North Lake Whatcom Trail.
▪ A couple was killed in 2006 when a massive tree fell on their SUV along Lake Whatcom Boulevard.
But there’s little scientific research on the subject of falling trees and even less data collected.
At the National Weather Service, records are kept for “wind-related fatalities” but don’t list cause.
The Weather Channel called it an “under-reported deadly danger” in a May 2021 article.
That story cited a 2008 report published in Springer Science+Business Media that listed 407 U.S. deaths from “wind-related tree failures” in the years 1995-2007.
“Tree drop limbs and they can cause injury sometimes,” Oliver said. “It happens. We live in an area with a lot of trees.”
Boatman said it’s unwise to hike in wooded areas during a storm.
“When you hear creaking in a tree — that’s a sign that something’s wrong,” he said.
