Tornado causes tree apocalypse in Naperville and Woodridge; loss could have aftereffects for years
If you look at Alexia Stroud’s Woodridge house at a certain angle in Google maps, you can barely see the two-story structure through the branches of the tall trees bordering her home.
On Monday morning, though, the trees were all gone. Snapped at their trunks, bark peeled away like banana skins, the evergreen sentinels lay in ruins.
“Every tree (was hit),” Stroud said, surveying the damage as the drone of chain saws carried through the neighborhood. “This used to be a nice shady yard.”
Officials say the EF-3 tornado that whipped through Naperville, Woodridge and Darien late Sunday damaged more than 200 houses and other structures, including some that were reduced to rubble. But the toll appeared to be far more severe on the trees in this verdant corner of DuPage County — destruction experts say could have repercussions for years to come.
It’s uncertain how many trees were irreparably damaged by wind speeds that reached more than 135 mph: Naperville spokeswoman Linda LaCloche said the city was focused on clearing the trees, not counting them, and a Woodridge spokesman did not return a request for comment.
But looking at satellite photos, it’s evident that hundreds, if not thousands, of trees were within the path of the three block-wide whirlwind. On the ground, it seemed few escaped damage, with many broken in half, shorn of huge branches or uprooted altogether. So many were cracked open that the air carried the scent of a lumberyard.
Work crews in both towns focused on trees toppled in the public way, leaving homeowners to deal with those felled in their yards. That irritated some residents.
“The village is like, ‘That’s private property so you’re on your own,’ pretty much,” said Woodridge resident Zoe Khan, looking at the huge trees uprooted in her backyard. “I don’t have money to pay for it so I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
The financial cost of losing a tree goes far beyond its disposal. It’s a truism among real estate agents that a lot is worth more with mature trees, and some research supports the idea.
Geoffrey Donovan, a Portland, Oregon-based research forester for the USDA Forest Service, studied trees placed in the green space between sidewalk and street in the Pacific Northwest city and estimated an average-size tree contributed about $7,100 to the sales price of the home it fronted, and about $13,000 to the total sales prices of other homes within 100 feet.
Another study he conducted found that adding a single tree in a house’s yard or nearby green space caused a rise in the monthly rental price.
“It’s a neighborhood asset,” he said. “Even if you have a tree in your yard and it goes down, you could be devaluing your neighbors’ home as well. So you get this spillover.”
He said there’s also increasing evidence trees have beneficial effects that go beyond the wallet. One famous study, published in 2001, looked at the vegetation around the now-demolished Ida B. Wells Homes on Chicago’s South Side and found “the greener a building’s surroundings were, the fewer crimes reported.”
Other research, Donovan said, has established that a drastic reduction in a community’s trees can result in adverse health effects even after controlling for race, education and income. Trees’ contribution toward air quality, stress reduction and social cohesion likely explain the health link, he said.
“You don’t get many expenditures in city government you can say are self-financing, but trees are one of them,” he said. “It’s important to recognize the benefits of trees are really broad — public health, crime, stormwater reduction. They reduce summer cooling cost and winter heating cost. They really do make a city more livable in so many ways.”
The Morton Arboretum in Lisle is just 5 miles north of where the tornado struck but its trees were essentially unharmed, plant knowledge specialist Sharon Yiesla said. For those who weren’t so lucky, she recommended contracting with an arborist to see if damaged trees can be saved.
A technique called “cabling,” which can preserve trees by connecting weak limbs to strong ones, is best left to professionals, she said. Homeowners should also try to improve the odds of their trees’ storm survival by making sure they are healthy, she said, though there’s only so much any tree can withstand.
“The first trees to go down are the ones that have rot in the middle or weak branches,” she said. “But let’s face it — tornadoes can take down even concrete buildings.”
LaCloche said Naperville will add more trees to its replacement program in 2022 — its budget already called for 150 to be planted this year — but as another storm-ravaged town can attest, making up the difference won’t be easy.
Coal City, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago, lost an estimated 50,000 trees during the 2015 tornado that also demolished 160 structures, village administrator Matt Fritz said. Since then, the village has planted roughly 500 trees that have grown to 12 or 14 feet, and handed out numerous sprigs to homeowners.
But the loss is still plain when traveling streets that used to be walled with summertime green and are now strangely open, he said.
“You could tell where that tornado went,” he said. “The telltale sign is how high the trees are.”
Twitter @JohnKeilman
