(Host) The storm 10 days ago that coated southern Vermont in a thick blanket of ice will probably continue to affect the region.
Experts say branches and limbs from damaged trees could continue to fall for a long time.
VPR’s Ross Sneyd has more.
(Sneyd) Bill Guenther headed out a few days after the storm to get a first hand look at the devastation wrought by the ice.
(Guenther) “On Tuesday morning I spent the better part of the day doing a reconnaissance of western and southwestern Windham County. Wanted to get up to some of the higher spots where I could see out and get some pretty good vistas. And I saw forest carnage in the woods of Windham County.”
(Sneyd) Guenther is the state forester for Windham County, and he wanted to see what was left.
He found trees that collapsed from the weight of the ice. Crowns toppled in a heap. Entire trunks uprooted. The east-facing slopes were hit the hardest, but the damage was everywhere.
Still, not everything had come down. Some trees are haphazardly holding up one another. In other spots, branches or crowns started to fall, but they got hung up on the way down.
The weight of the latest snow has caused more of that to fall. But Guenther says more branches will come crashing down.
(Guenther) “The hazards are very extreme in some areas where the ice damage was the heaviest. In many cases, folks will find what we call in forestry jargon ‘widow makers’. As the name sort of implies, as you might guess, those are portions of trees that are just literally hanging in the tops of trees or hanging by a thread, perhaps, and these could be pieces weighing hundreds of pounds that could come down on an unsuspecting person walking around the woods.”
(Sneyd) Or on to power lines again. Utility officials say they expect to have sporadic outages for a while. At least until more of those widow makers come down out of the trees.
Dottie Schnure of Green Mountain Power says the damage was as bad as many in her company have ever seen.
(Schnure) “It’s interesting. The folks that were there described as bad as the ’98 ice storm up here, probably even worse. More devastation. The total number of customers was less but that’s because of the density of population here. The amount of repair work we did down south really well exceeded what we did up here in 1998.”
(Sneyd) Bill Guenther, the Windham County forester, says it’s hard to imagine the shape the woods are in.
He says anyone who goes out in the woods this winter should be careful. Don’t go alone if you can help it. Avoid windy days. Sunny days are better, when it’s easier to see tree damage that might be ready to fall. And …
(Guenther) “If there’s any damage to any great extent I would encourage folks to walk in the woods with a hard hat on because it does not take a large piece of wood to cause a lot of damage.”
(Sneyd) It’s that bad.
But foresters say their experience from the big ice storm in northern Vermont in 1998 is that a lot of those damaged trees will recover. Guenther says the sugar maples may well be the first.
For VPR News, I’m Ross Sneyd.