In tree-hugging Pacific Northwest, what happens when one of the most powerful symbols of

Cason and Philip Wolcott chose to buy the house on a small Gresham side street because a large grove of majestic trees abutted its backyard.

When a neighbor died shortly after they moved in six years ago, they were among the local residents who successfully pushed for the city to buy her property, which abutted their backyard, and add the trees to an existing undeveloped city park rather than allowing a developer to cut them down.

“We had this beautiful green space behind us. We wanted the trees there,” Cason Wolcott said.

But earlier this month, as a weeklong ice-snow-and-wind storm launched its assault on the Portland area, the trees they had loved suddenly turned hostile.

“We were sitting on the couch, watching the trees sway and Philip started to yell, ‘This one’s us! This one’s us!’ and the tree cracked, turned and started falling,” Cason Wolcott recalled. The couple had just enough time to grab their two dogs and a cat and dive to the floor.

The tree landed with a thud in the kitchen, 5 feet away from the living room where they had been sitting, slicing the house in half. Debris rained down. Water gushed from broken pipes.

“It was like a bomb went off,” she said.

Ten days later, the two watched, still in disbelief, as a crane removed the massive tree trunk from what used to be their home.

“Now I understand the power of those trees. I’m not mad at them, but I’m a little hesitant to go back,” Cason Wolcott said.

The two aren’t alone in their newfound ambivalence. January’s storm felled hundreds of massive trees across the region. Falling trees killed an elderly man inside a Lake Oswego home and a woman trapped inside a Southeast Portland motor home, and they injured countless other residents. The trees crushed houses, cars, power lines and power poles, causing millions in property damage and tens of thousands of power outages.

In a place known for its lush green spaces, the experience of large trees collapsing on such a massive scale has led to a new anxiety about our coexistence with the cherished emblem of Portland and the region.

It has also led some to question their municipalities’ local tree rules and to call for more tree removal and even a change in the type of trees cities plant in the future.

“City leaders need to rethink tree codes and cap how big they allow these trees to be in urban areas,” former state Rep. Julie Parrish of West Linn, now a newly minted lawyer, tweeted last week. “Large stand-alone trees won’t withstand wind/ice, and they put lives in harm’s way when they fall.”

The damage has been all the more unsettling because many of the trees uprooted and damaged by the storm, according to arborists and local news reports, were Douglas firs, the region’s iconic tree and its most common conifer. The Douglas fir is Oregon’s official state tree, a powerful symbol that graces the state flag and most passenger car license plates.

After the storm, one user on the social platform Reddit presented a new state flag: It features a toppled Douglas fir.

MILLIONS DID NOT FALL

The city of Portland has more than 4 million trees – 218,000 street trees, 1.2 million park trees and 2.9 million trees on private property. The trees are a source of pride for the city, though Portland’s tree canopy has been shrinking in recent years, raising alarms.

During the recent storm, Portland’s Urban Forestry division received more than 700 reports of trees or large branches that fell onto roads and other city-managed property, said Mark Ross, a spokesperson with Portland Parks & Recreation. Washington County counted more than 160 fallen trees and Lake Oswego, more than 125, with more falling in other nearby cities. Those counts don’t include trees that keeled over onto private property.

While Ross acknowledged that the storm was one of the most destructive to trees in recent years, he also noted that the vast majority of Portland’s trees withstood the onslaught.

City officials and arborists said the storm created a perfect combination of conditions for downing trees, including ground saturation, snow and ice buildup on the tree canopy and unusually strong east winds.

“The trees turned into these huge wind sails and they were much heavier than they typically are,” said Curtis Falbo, an arborist with Wind Thin Tree Service.

Climate change – including extreme heat and dryness – may also have stressed the trees, making them less healthy over time, Ross said. And root problems may have weakened their hold on soil.

But not all tree failures are predictable, he said. In some cases, the storm took out perfectly healthy trees.

“Mature trees that fell in this storm event withstood the effects of previous weather events,” Ross said. “And some dead trees or trees which have experienced impacts of pests, disease, or are towards the ends of their lives remained standing while some healthy trees were damaged.”

TRAPPED BY A TREE

The falling trees and the devastation they wrought over the course of a long, cold week left many people traumatized and anxious – and rethinking their relationship with trees, a natural reaction, said Thomas Joseph Doherty, a Portland psychologist who specializes in how climate change affects mental health.

“It’s a cautionary tale,” Doherty said. “As weather patterns are changing and becoming more erratic, it creates unexpected levels of damage that we’re not used to and which are really unsettling for people. These are legitimate losses to mourn, but we also have to learn from these disasters and figure out what we can do better in the future.”

Some people may take a lot longer to recover than others, he said.

Jose Ruiz Valentine and his wife, Addisun Salazar, love nature. Three years ago, the young couple were thrilled to rent a house on a large lot just underneath Powell Butte, the 600-acre natural area in outer Southeast Portland with trees and trails galore.

“We would go out our back door and see Powell Butte. It was beautiful,” Ruiz Valentine said.

“It felt like we were living in a big forest. I loved the air quality,” Salazar added.

In the shadow of those mighty trees they raised their daughter Layla, now 4, and planned to welcome their new baby later this winter. But on the Saturday when the storm began, their love of nature and trees was severely tested.

While Ruiz Valentine was at work Jan. 13 and Layla was at a grandmother’s house, Salazar, home alone, tried to nap in an upstairs bedroom. Suddenly, she saw the roof shake and heard a loud crashing sound. She thought it was an earthquake. She then saw a single sharp branch pierce the bedroom ceiling 2 feet away from her. Debris showered the floor.

She scooted against the wall and backed herself into a corner until the shaking stopped. What she could not see was that the wind had uprooted a large Douglas fir on the property and the tree had plunged into the house, crushing the roof like an accordion.

Salazar wasn’t physically hurt. She called Ruiz Valentine, then got up and tried to open the door. She noticed the door frame was cracked and the wall was bent out as if about to collapse. She couldn’t open the door or the window. She was trapped.

She dialed 911, but the only help that arrived was her husband’s stepfather who eventually climbed up the tree, broke a window in the house, got in and then brought Salazar down with him.

The tree had caused the house to cave in, crushing all the doors. It decimated the three bedrooms, the staircase and the garage, rendering the family instantly homeless.

Their renters’ insurance has yet to reimburse them for any losses and their landlord does not need to pay Portland’s mandatory renter relocation fee because a natural disaster rendered the house uninhabitable.

Still, they consider themselves lucky. Salazar survived. And a local nonprofit is helping the couple pay for an AirBnB while they look for a new place to live.

Their next home, said Salazar, likely won’t have trees.

“I never really thought something would change the way that I look at trees,” she said. “But I get really bad anxiety now hearing the wind in the trees at night. And when a branch broke at the AirBnB where we’re staying, it just startled me a lot.”

CUT THEM DOWN

Falbo, the arborist with Wind Thin Tree Service, has had a front seat to this type of anxiety.

Since the storm hit, the certified arborist and risk assessor has put in long days examining fallen trees and guiding his crew in removing their massive trunks from homes.

He has listened to countless stories of near-misses and of people trapped by trees in collapsed bedrooms, has watched those who survived cry over what was lost or frantically look for their pets in the ruins, their possessions exposed among the debris, their lives in disarray.

Last Saturday morning, Falbo pulled up in his 20-year-old truck to the Wolcotts’ house in Gresham. The sight was dramatic but no longer surprised him. Over the past two weeks, he had witnessed more than three dozen homes with similar damage.

His small crew moved quickly across the still-icy yard, throwing branches into the wood chipper, sawing the upended roots, then crawling onto the tree trunk to hook it up to a crane. The crane pulled the tree straight out the front of the house.

Cason and Philip Wolcott stood on the sidewalk, recording videos with their phones.

The city of Gresham said it had found root rot in 2021 in some of the trees behind the Wolcotts’ backyard – an area part of a small undeveloped park called Southwest Community Park.

“The City developed a plan to systematically remove and evaluate several trees over the next few years. The specific tree that fell on the home was not known by the City to be infected with laminated root rot,” Gresham spokesperson Sarah Cagann told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Many of the fallen trees that Falbo has assessed this month had shallow roots with signs of root damage, including laminated root rot, a tree disease caused by a fungal pathogen that decays the root system. Decayed and shallow roots are unable to hold trees upright in a strong wind, he said. It’s unclear, he said, if those root problems are caused by climate warming or result from trees growing in an urban environment with few other trees to support them underground.

Meanwhile, Falbo’s company has fielded hundreds of frantic calls in recent days from residents whose trees, weakened by the storm, appear to be leaning or swaying. Some have also asked Falbo to remove perfectly healthy trees that simply happen to grow close to their homes.

“It…